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Cherny, I don't mean the extended Fellowship is slowly paced, I mean it's badly paced.
Exhibit A is when suspense is building about the Black Riders arriving in the Shire: Moody scary scene cuts to moody scary scene in the theatrical, and the suspense-building pace is achieved through smart editing. Happy singing scenes with jokes are inserted between the moody scary scenes in the extended edition, and suspense-building is destroyed.
There are other tidbits which, while good individually, wreck the pacing of certain scenes. Stuff with Bilbo, Merry and Pippin at the birthday party; expositionary stuff about mithril in the Mines of Moria. The inserts are good stuff ... but compare them to how the scenes were masterfully paced and edited without them, and it will be apparent what flows more nicely.
Similarly, the entire reworking of Gandalf's arrival in Hobbiton is awful in the extended version. Changing the tone entirely from delightful to dangerous (a misguided introduction to Bilbo Baggins if ever there was one) was a terrible revision. And just compare the re-ordering and insertion of additional shots in this sequence for a lesson in how little but vital a difference there is between a well-constructed sequence and a poor one.
Pfft, the extended version of Fellowship is a textbook case.
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