The film wasn't composed of the best eighty minutes that they filmed, rather they used the scenes they needed to construct a decent film out of. There are deleted scenes in the DVD extras which could easily have been in the film (my personal favourites of those are Petyr's funeral and Stu's memorial scenes, as well as the long scene where they first met Stu), and were good enough, in my opinion, but of course there were also some which would not have moved the story along so they didn't make the cut.
They used less then forty seconds of Deacon's dance in the film, whereas there had actually been about three minutes filmed - it's great fun to watch the whole thing but it might have been overkill to have used more than a minute of it for the feature. There are other scenes which are great for stand-alone viewings but would be out of place in the finished product. I like a scene where Viago and Deacon are in the pottery room, chatting about Viago's love for Katherine - very entertaining, but had no real reason to be added to the final edit. If they had only randomly taken 'the best scenes' and stitched them together, it would be nothing more than a sketch show. It had to make sense in its entirety.
There had been a rough script written before filming so Taika and Jemaine must have had some idea of the narrative they wanted to create but because the vast majority of what they shot was improvised, they couldn't control the output completely. I guess they had a lot of fun making up all kinds of scenarios to give them a good choice when it came to editing it all together. I reckon most fans of the film would enjoy a large percentage of what they filmed if we were given the chance to view it. Apart from the likelihood of a few duff scenes, there's no reason to suppose that all the unused portions are substandard in any way. I don't think it's a case of well, they filmed enough stuff so it was bound to be a hit - well-received, endearing and hilarious comedy is very difficult to happen upon. I'm sure you'd need more than merely an excess of material to have the odds stacked in your favour as you seem to believe.
One last thing, apparently, the cast ended up laughing through so many of the takes so not all the footage would have been usable without some seriously good editing. I'm betting a fair amount of what was filmed was just full of bloopers and people corpsing!
Yessss! Night-time.
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