I finished reading the book a couple week ago and one thing has been bothering me. It's the apparent dwarfs are helpless.
In the book the dwarfs are always getting into trouble with no plan of escape. And it is always Gandalf or Bilbo that gets them out.
Gandalf saves them from the Trolls and from the Goblin/Warg attack, THen Bilbo saves then from the Spiders and from the elf king.
It seems that he dwarfs were only hindering the expedition and would have been dead early on had it not been for a single Hobbit to continuously bale them out,