howard shore really has to step his game up for this hobbit trilogy. there were so many great cues in lotr and the best bits of hobbit's soundtrack were just reusing them. or maybe it's like star wars where it's so iconic at this point that you can't help but feel this way.
One thing to bare in mind with the AUJ soundtrack, it was likely a victim of the sudden jump from two films to three. Originally the first film was also meant to include Beorn, Dol Goldur, and Mirkwood - adding a lot more variety to the soundtrack. Removing those, you lose a lot of opportunity for new tracks and themes.
Shore was obviously going to reuse motifs and call back to well-known tracks from the LotR trilogy, like for the Shire and Rivendell. But it seemed pretty obvious to me that he rather suddenly had to stretch out his music that was only meant to cover about half-way through the run time of AUJ to then cover the entire film.
I guarantee you its partially why we hear the Misty Mountains theme everytime the company gets into a fight in AUJ, there was no time to compose and orchestrate a different fight theme when Shore had to scramble to stretch out his music for the first film and save the rest for DOS. They even said during one of the vlogs that the orchestra didn't rehearse before recording the OST. They would show up, be given sheet music they'd never seen before, and just record right away.
