Possibly. But I know a lot of people who find Tom irrelevant to the plot. It looks more like a silly digression just at the time the book had shifted from "Hobbit sequel" to serious epic. He talks in poetry that can feel singsong and childish.
Tolkien fans seem to focus on the bit with the Ring, which is an engaging enigma without a resolution. It makes him seem very important and powerful, but the story doesn't explore it much. It's a small part of a chapter that otherwise can feel like a distraction.
So a lot of fans, I think, are happy to see him go so you can get to better developed characters like Elrond and Aragorn. There is a lot more going on in that chapter, especially if you read it closely, but I can see why a lot of people are happy to skip on to the barrow wights, where the stakes are higher. Even if the ending to it is just "Tom comes back to fix it".
The comments on this thread make it seem more likely that your circle of people who disliked Tom is the outlier rather than those of us who thoroughly enjoy him as a character.
Scott was unusually-for-a-movie subtle about it, and it's easily lost in the atmosphere. More or less, depending on which film cut. Makes re-watching even more fun though!
I had to tell a couple people (generally college aged) to skip that chapter in order to get them to continue reading the books (around the time that the movies were coming out), as he wasn't important to the rest of the narrative.
I know I was questioning if I wanted to finish the books when I read that part in 6th grade. The rest of it obviously made up for it.
From your link, the set of comments under the first answer also shows there is clearly a debate.
I'm not arguing that there aren't some people who don't enjoy Tom, only that it's not a clear and overwhelming majority. The comment arguing that Tom is extraneous has 5 votes, on an answer with over 400. Though, to be fair, that's a self-selected sample, because Tolkien fans who aren't that interested in Tom probably wouldn't click on the question. But still, I think more evidence has been provided in this thread and that one for Tolkien fans enjoying Tom as a whole than for fans not enjoying him.
It's pedantic to argue about really, but hey, it's the internet! And what better way to take a break from beating one's head against one's cloud provider than to have a gently pedantic argument about something that matters not one bit on the internet ;)
I have a large circle of friends with a wide diversity of opinions about Tom. It's not representative, so I have no idea who is an outlier. But I understand why each of them sees it the way they do, and I'm certain that none of them is unique in their outlook.
I believe a stackexchange conversation is a very skewed set of Tolkien fans, who are there specifically to discuss those kinds of questions. There are many ways to be a fan of Tolkien.
I like Tom a lot but my own theory as to why he is in The Lord of the Rings is because Tolkien had already created him. You get a sense that the world-building Tolkien did began with a somewhat more fairytale-like world with characters like Tom Bombadil. First The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings took the world up to something less childish, more ... Arthurian?
Tom was at that point a round peg in a square hole, but Tolkien shoehorned him in nonetheless.
The History of Middle Earth gives an almost unprecedented insight into how an author works. Which is fortunate, since Tolkien himself is an unprecedented writer.
He had a singular way of revising, almost pathologically, holding some key points utterly fixed and revamping everything else to make them fit. It's why he never finalized The Silmarillion, and why when his son finally did publish it, he discarded a lot of the work done post-Lord of the Rings.
I believe you are correct: Tom was one of those fixed points, for no reason he could explain. He later said that Tom was left as a deliberate mystery. Which is a bit disingenuous, but that's fine. Tolkien worked by instinct, and his works are extraordinary. If his instinct tells him that Tom needed to be in the narrative, that's fine by me.
If other readers are perplexed by it, they will hopefully forgive it long enough to get through the book and read it again. It's very much the kind of book that you won't fully understand in a single reading, if ever.
It provides some pretty key context to where Merry got his blade from and why it is able to break the spell and make the Witch King killable. Bit of a better explanation than Eowyn's "I am no man."
I think “I am no man” is a perfectly good explanation in the movie. It implies that the witch king is relying on a prophesy he doesn’t fully understand (rather than a spell). “If Croesus goes to war, he will destroy a great empire.”
There's also a strong tie between this kind of prophecy and Tolkien's (and Anglo-Saxon literature generally's) love of the riddle form; "riddles in the dark" draws clear inspiration from Vafþrúðnismál, which doubles as both prophecy and riddles. Along these lines, I also recommend Adam Roberts's The Riddles of The Hobbit.
That "I am no man" thing is annoying because it's a loose thread on the tapestry of Middle-Earth. It's obviously a Macbeth reference:
"Fear not, Macbeth; no man that's born of woman. Shall e'er have power upon thee."
In Macbeth that turns out to be a man who was a Caesarean birth but Tolkein thought that was a cheap solution to the problem. A hobbit and a woman, now we're talking.
And if you think about that you realize the ents and huorn were a reference too:
"[he] shall never vanquished be until the Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill shall come against him"
It turns out that Tolkein confirmed that the huorn and the ents came from his disappointment as a child that the trees in Macbeth were just guys wearing branches.
Once you know that it's hard to look at the books in the same way. You have to compare Denethor's role as unfaithful steward with the stewards in Macbeth and pretty soon you're just running a comparative literature class in your head.
Who's Wormtongue supposed to be? Is he a reference to King Lear's daughters? Is the scene where he tries to marry Eowyn a reference to Richard III?
Aragorn's speech is awfully Henry V, and the return of the Army of the Dead is awfully like the WWI short-story of the Angels of Mons where Henry's army returned to the aid of the British line.
Searching for tropes is a normal part of reading literature but normally you're just looking for parallels. I wish he hadn't included an actual reference to Macbeth to force the issue.
I don't recall it explicitly making him killable? Eowyn still finishes him off in the book without (I assume?) an ambiguously magical blade.
I always thought it was more of a misleading prophecy, very like Macbeth (probably inspired by? Tolkien certainly drew some inspiration from Macbeth in other areas); "No man of woman born" and "Not by the hand of man" are both interpreted as "can't be killed" but really turn out to have very significant loopholes.
Merry's sword was Númenorean, but there was no need of that entire digression to get Merry a Númenorean sword. The movie has Aragorn tell them "here are some weapons, help yourselves", which is just as good.
You can argue that much of the books can be eliminated because they're just not Hollywood, reading is for boomers after all.
The origin of the blade is relevant because they nearly died in getting it, and because it came from the tomb of a prince who himself died battling the Witch King, so in a sense he obtained vengeance from beyond the grave. "Wow, this sword just turned out to be magic, what a coincidence" isn't nearly the same thing.
Film--even a whole trilogy of films--is a different medium from books. Books are in general much more tolerant of diversions that don't move the story forward. Bombadil was pretty much a diversion.
The films also had to deal with the fact that the LoTR books had a lot of material after the ring was destroyed--and that's not even counting all the material in the appendix of RoTK. Say whatever positive things you like about LoTR but the narrative structure of RoTK in particular is a bit of a mess.
I don't think it was "a mess" (just reread it this spring). Books support a lot more alternatives to structuring a story than most movies, with their tight time limits, want to explore.
That doesn't mean movies are better: in fact, movies are clearly more limited and worse, from the point of view of telling long, complicated stories. But people enjoy movies (me too), so... compromises.
Tolkien fans seem to focus on the bit with the Ring, which is an engaging enigma without a resolution. It makes him seem very important and powerful, but the story doesn't explore it much. It's a small part of a chapter that otherwise can feel like a distraction.
So a lot of fans, I think, are happy to see him go so you can get to better developed characters like Elrond and Aragorn. There is a lot more going on in that chapter, especially if you read it closely, but I can see why a lot of people are happy to skip on to the barrow wights, where the stakes are higher. Even if the ending to it is just "Tom comes back to fix it".