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No, but they did anyways. ATLA can't be turned into a good stand alone film, no matter how you slice the material. Either you cut all character development and story motivation to retain an arc, or you fail to have an arc at all. From a technical perspective you can also say that the series loses a lot in the transition from animation to live film, along with other things like the loss of Jeremy Zuckerman and Ben Wynn's original score.

character development can still be done if they do a 2.5-3 hour movie per arc i guess, but needs to be carefully handled, movies are doing better visual effects day by day(see: INTERSTELLAR!!!) so that shouldn't be an issue down the road, unless they do it like they did dragon ball evolution ;-;
soundtracks idk what to say about

While yes there is some room for character development, taking the raw work, which is about 460 min, and cutting it down to like 150 min messes with the pacing horrendously. There are entire 22 min blocks in the first season dedicated to a certain character's rise and fall (or vice versa) such as 1-10, 1-12, 1-14, 1-16, etc. where outside of character study there isn't much going on in relation to the overarching story. The fact that there is time to slow down and organically build up character motivations and scenarios is a huge component of what makes the show worthwhile. It's also part of what makes the pacing in season 2 work as well as it does, because so much background information has already been cleverly built up. A good example of terrible pacing in regards to character development within ATLA itself can be seen in 3-16, where everything is rushed and scenes frantically cut from one to the next because there's so much information that needs to be dolled out.

holy shit a thesis calm down bro

That's like barely a paragraph >_<

putting in time for anything will almost always result in an improvement, same for avatar, but doesn't mean there's some unnecessary fluff here and there(IDR I WATCHED LONG AGO ONLY ONCE!!) which would cut down some time, plus some other stuff can be removed which nobody would miss unless they're intense fans of the show itself. ofc you can't have as much perfection in a 150 min movie as in say 20 30-min episodes, but the 150 min can still be really good if used wisely. it will still come down to how the director will go about it, but i won't rule out there can't be good movies on it

While I agree there is some fluff, in reality there isn't very much, especially compared to other animated series which literally take 60 min of content and manage to stretch it out over 20 episodes. In S1 the only fluff is like one scene from 1-6, some of 1-15, and most of episodes 1-11 and 1-14, the later two of which are still worthwhile in their own right as they have some character development and interesting technical aspects (animation in 1-11's storytelling scenes for example). Even with all the marginally worthwhile stuff gone its still about 400 min of material, which is pretty much impossible for a screenwriter to condense and still meet the bar (or anything close to it) set by the original.

ofc the beginning of any story won't have that much fluff, it's the middle part that does, also count the time of the opening songs and the intro in every episode, as well as some repeated time spent on cliffhangers in episodes which won't exist in movies that much. how much character development can be left out/is necessary is ofc purely objective(or subjective? idk the difference), but im sure there's a lot that can be left out while still keeping the movie good