It's difficult when changes like that are made and you're familiar with the source. I guess you've got to look at it through the lense of "if I were watching this for the first time, is there anything to indicate to me that this is anything more than a minor character?". However, I do think edits sometimes attempt to do this and the error is not with the viewer, but with there being too much footage retained of the character. (that's not a knock on M4's edit though - I haven't seen it).
Yep this is the issue you run into it with removing Azog entirely except for the battle, it's always a question of how much to cut and how much to keep.
For the sake of discussion I'll go more in depth (but I know that you weren't trying to critique my edit, it's just a really good point of discussion for book edits here!), I found there to be 2 specific issues, for anyone curious about this topic:
1) Since he duels Thorin, this originally used to be a huge pay off to their trilogy-long feud, is there a way to play it off like Thorin is just fighting a random Orc commander (like Gothmog or Lurtz, sorta)?
2) How can Azog be naturally introduced, given that his entire backstory is cut?
For #1, this is completely subjective, but I felt that given how much we see of Thorin and his arc, him dueling Azog is just another step of the way in paying off
his character, going from greedy and prideful to selfless and willing to sacrifice himself to help the good guys win, the duel is mostly about Thorin being the hero after going to his lowest points. As a bonus, I tried to keep a decent amount of "Azog being a good commander" moments where the movie shows us "this guy is making the Orcs win" so that way we have a motive after removing their history - it's not just kill him for the sake of it, but kill him because the Orcs will be leaderless and unorganized.
The Maple edit fixes #2 by having him introduced by the Goblin King and then showing up right after briefly, but I didn't want to do that with my goals in mind, I wanted to keep Azog just to the final battle.
So to fix #2 (this was a revision after lots of feedback and thought), I decided to re-include the Gandalf scene where he warns us about Orcs coming, which just feels right with his character (and also doubles as a way of explaining why Gandalf was gone) and then a following quick scene showing the Orcs marching to the mountain with new subtitles (about wanting to claim the Mountain), so we can expect to see Azog's face in the future plus we have a motive for the army, it doesn't seem completely out of the blue.
Clocking in at just under 20 minutes of battling, I think a decent balance of his character was hit in order to feel natural to the audience. What are your guys' thoughts that have seen my edit or other book edits? Curious to see what the consensus with Azog is. Was also surprised to see
BOTFE entirely remove him given that his edit isn't about being book accurate, I like it.