Hoo boy. You people need to stop having these discussions when I’m not at the keyboard, all the catching up is serious work. 
I’ll just go through stuff in order:
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Also, in the book, Grima had a few weaselly mannerisms, but I don’t think Tolkien intended for him to be as physically repulsive as Bakshi and Jackson made him. Once upon a time, he had been one of Rohan’s best and brightest.
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I recall Grima’s physical description as not being terribly flattering. Pale, heavy lidded eyes, etc. Don’t have the book handy though.
The White Council has been adequately covered already - Galadriel was the one who created it, and she and a bunch of other important elves were members. It waas not a “council of White Wizards” but a “Council of the white” by which we mean “those who oppose the forces of darkness.”
Rohan. Well, I think you’ll get to see something of how important Rohan is in RotK, so I’ll mostly leave that aside too. Suffice it to say that Rohan is -big-, and we don’t see the more densely populated parts, overall. They are farmers and herdsman, and they absolutely do not fill their whole country end to end. But the country is big, so might be surprised at how many Rohirrim there are. In terms of how the only place in Middle Earth that looks “prosperous” is The Shire, well, I think it’s been mentioned here already that The Shire is more of an… what was it? Edwardian England sort of place, vs the rest of Middle Earth which has a more medieval feel. This will explain the differences in “prosperity” a little, perhaps. Also, The Shire, while a green and happy place, is pretty tiny. For reference, here is a pretty decent Map of Middle Earth that Google turned up for me. You can see the Shire in the middle of Eriador in the upper left. It runs from roughly the label for Michel Delving, past the big blot of Hobbiton, about as far as the label for “Buckland” in the East, and probably about half that far north south, with Hobbiton more or less in the center again. Now compare Rohan. It extends from the Gap of Rohan in the West, to roughly the “A” in Anorien in the East, Fangorn Forest in the North, and the White Mountains in the south. The West Emnet is the more thickly peopled part, which you will note, is not the part that Aragorn and co, running from Sarn Gebir towards Fangorn Forest, crossed.
Your questions about the various groups of Men are already mostly answered, but to re-summarize: The Dunlendings (Now of Dunland, to the Northwest of Rohan) were the original inhabitants of Rohan, before the men of Gondor, who nominally claimed the land, gave to the Rohirrim to be in thanks for bailing them out in a battle against the forces of Mordor. The Dunlendings have been bitter since. As for the other Men you’ve seen, they are in service of Sauron, not Saruman, and hail from that big area in the southeast labelled “Haradwaith”
The wild men aren’t really druidic at all. In fact, if I had to draw any sort of paralell, they remind me more of a sort of African Tribesman sort of arrangement.
The Mearas are super-horses. Stronger, smarter, faster, better and more picky than ordinary horses.
You’ve actually already seen a bit of Gondor - remember in Fellowship when Gandalf rides off to do some research about Frodo’s ring? He goes to a city with a nice view of the Mountains of Shadow and rummages through some tomes and scrolls? That’s in Gondor.
As for Extended RotK: YMMV, but for me the added content contained way too much “Oh. Yeah. PJ used to direct low budget horror films.” and not nearly enough stuff that advanced the story. PJ let too much of the wrong kind of dorkiness bleed through into several sequences that were rightly cut from the theatrical but were, for some reason, re-inserted in the extended cut. The first ten minutes of the extended version is the only portion that I felt added significantly, and that was too divergent from the book to really sit right with me.
