He saw the Sea... against the lady Galadriel's advice to heed the gulls calls, and he began to long deeply to sail across to the grey havens, so maybe his love of battle and slaying filth in middle earth was trumped.
Considering that the Hobbit was 300 pages, while LOTR was 3X that amount, of course they would need to add plot devices. As far as we know, Legolas could have been there the entire time, but the book is writing wise and story wise, the prelude to events to happen in LOTR. So he probably hadn't even conceived Legolas when writing it. but everything in Middle Earth is very connected... although he was not mentioned in the story, They did go through his home of Mirkwood, which is not out of the realm of possibility that he would be there.
I rather like the inclusion of new devices, unlike the mass of information cut from LOTR... like Radagast. He is one of the 5 wizards... not as powerful as Gandalf or Saruman, he is like a guardian of forests. I wonder if he knew Treebeard or any other ents.
So how would Peter Jackson's motives be any different than providing the fanbase with more movies? Whether you believe it or not, he has stayed very true to the original material.
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