I have finally got around to viewing your fanedit. Excellent overall, however, I have some minor notes for you to consider if you ever wish to update again.
For Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire, you attempted to remove the orcs, but then decided not to hide them. My only suggestion here is if you are no longer hiding the orcs, maybe 1 or 2 addition orc closeups are warranted? One whom may have viewed this edit without reviewing your updates may assume that you meant to remove to orcs entirely but accidentally left in a few seconds of orc footage by mistake. Dispersing a couple more orc shots throughout the scene would leave little doubt.
I can’t recall how it was exactly in the official version, but in Mirkwood the transition between the company’s battle with the spiders and being ambushed by the elves was quite abrupt. I was actually momentarily distracted during that cut having looked off screen for about 5 seconds, going from the fight to the ambush struck me oddly and kinda caught me off balance, lol. If you could manage to maybe throw in an additional shot of the company fleeing the spider’s den the flow of the cut would become alot smoother.
The transition between Barrels Out of Bond and A Warm Welcome lends itself a bit to the obviousness of cut footage. Partially in the somewhat quick cut from the company trying to keep afloat on raging waters to drifting on calm in the next shot. Not much can be done about that I imagine, given you can only work with so much footage available to you. But the thing I noticed most of all is the music transition with the orchestral track seeming to ramp up into something, yet fading away as the next chapter begins. You probably been over this yourself, but again, if you can find a way to smooth this transition, the editing seam here might be made invisible to those who may have never seen the originals.
The battle sequence around the 3:27:10-25 mark is oddly quiet. Quiet as in, there is a huge battle raging in the scene, yet the only sound we hear is of things in the shots that are obvious. This may be how the sound was in the official version, but the shots feel off because of this. I feel that these shots (and maybe a few others shots in the chapter overall, to a lesser degree) would benefit having additional battle sounds (the clang of steel, orc shrieks, etc) added to the sound mix to add to the fullness of the battle.
To restate, I thought the edit was overall excellent. If you somehow patched up some of these seams (some of which you may have already attempted to do previously) I would say that this edit could conceivable be found in an official studio home video release. Also overall, I to prefer this edit to the previous Hobbit edit I have seen, so great work!