Still, Tom looks a little light in the boots to me.

Image from this essay, which may be informative. My own theory is that Bombadil was actually Peter Jackson, doing location scouting.

Jackson, who scrubbed both Bombadil and the Scouring of the Shire from the movies, can take some comfort in this:

Many readers of the Lord of the Rings consider Tom's presence in the first book to be an unnecessary intrusion into the narrative, which could be omitted without loss. Tolkien was aware of their feelings, and in part their judgment was correct. As Tolkien wrote in a letter in 1954, ". . . many have found him an odd and indeed discordant ingredient. In historical fact I put him in because I had already invented him. . . and wanted an 'adventure' on the way. But I kept him in, and as he was, because he represents certain things otherwise left out" (Ibid., p. 192). Judging by these remarks, critical readers are correct about the arbitrariness of Tom's introduction into the story; however, as Tolkien continues, he deliberately (nonarbitrary) kept Tom in to fulfill a particular role, to provide an additional dimension.

As for the scouring, it had a lot of symbolic value in the book, and environmentalists and anti-industrialists still prong wood (non-rain-forest) when they read it, (as, admittedly, do some libertarians and anarchists), but it would have added an impossibly large load to the end of the movie, which some critics already thought had "too many endings."