Well, the way that Nolan decided to go with the film probably would have made it rather hard for Batman to be the way he was in Begins and TDK. For him, it's been 8 years of being alone, sitting around doing nothing, and basically wearing his bones completely down (as you could probably see by the first fight with Bane, he was terrible). For me, I thought Rises was mostly about character development, the way Batman retrained himself by fixing his back and then learning how to fight properly all over again, and eventually learning to use the fear of death, which in turn led to deciding to make the jump without the rope so he could save Gotham.
I personally liked it better too way; too much fighting and repetition isn't great for a trilogy conclusion, especially this trilogy conclusion.