Tolkien was fantastically good at using conversations to info-dump without seeming to AND move the plot along. Part of his craft, which is the symphonic weaving of themes in things like the Council of Elrond and the talk at the court of Lothlorien, have been exhaustively examined, but I wonder whether everyone notices that he also has a way of surrounding each major conversation or debate with a few smaller outriders, as the characters have come out of some wasteland action episode or battle, and they start talking at length again. The Council of Elrond is preceded by Gandlf and Frodo's dialogue, and then by the scene in Elrond's hall and the meeting of Frodo and Bilbo, and followed by a number of lesser debates, some only partially reported, as the Fellowship gets ready to move out into the wild. Talk during journey and/or action scenes has a different quality, curter and referring mostly back to things already said or mentioned by the narrator. It is as though the debate episodes had their own dramatic value (and indeed, I never get tired of re-reading them) and needed to be built up to and down from in order to achieve their proper impact. I say this because you (inverarity) sound like these dialogues and debates might also have a dramatic and climactic value, and so this might be a useful way to look at them and see if they work in context.