I hope you will take my answer to heart. Your remark about your son's speech issues is important and you need to take this into account.
You need an ENT who understands speech problems, hypernasality, hyponasality, deep nasal pharnyx, and occult submucous cleft palates to help you before deciding on surgery. You can get the ear tubes done separately if you feel that you need more time to figure the rest out.
The ENT who doesn't want to mess with the adenoids has several reasons why. You should ask him or her what those reasons are. One of the reasons from a SPEECH point of view is that the adenoids are a ROOF that makes it so that the soft palate has something to reach UP to in order to make certain sounds. Without a roof, your son's speech can be compromised. Knowing whether your son has a short soft palate or a long soft palate is important in understanding the issue of the roof and how important those adenoids are to his speech.
An ENT who doesn't take speech into account, and only thinks about the issue of health, shouldn't be making this decision. Your child's current health is important. But speech problems will dog him for the rest of his life.
If you have not had a nasal endoscopy done on him, do this. He needs this diagnostic test done before ANY adenoid surgery should be done. The doctor CANNOT see his adenoids at all without this being done.
Just to let you know, my son at 2 years old had his huge tonsils removed and ear tubes placed. The doctor shaved his adenoids a slight amount because they had infection in them. I do not know how much he removed, but he said not much. My son had speech problems and hypernasality, and at the time, we didn't know why. A nasal endoscopy was not performed until he was 4 years old. We had moved and the new ENT wanted to remove my son's adenoids because of his sinus infections, but refused to do any diagnostic testing before putting him through surgery. That didn't set right with me, and my son's speech therapist found another ENT who would do a nasal endoscopy for us. It turned out that my son has an occult (hidden) submucous cleft palate. His palate is very short, and along with a submucous cleft, the adenoid roof should be left alone. His already hypernasal speech would have been even worse if I had let that doctor remove any more of his adenoids. As it was, the nasal endoscopy showed that he is adenoids were actually small and uninvolved, NOT the reason for the sinus infections. I would have been so upset if this doctor had put my child under just to find THAT out. So, the point I am making here is that it's important to have diagnostic testing done BEFORE a surgery, and you should know if there are any structural issues that surgery might cause negative ramifications for.
If I had let that doctor do the surgery, my son's already compromised structure could have been made worse, and his speech would have been worse than it already was because of it.
Sometimes you have to do your own research and have a straight talk with a doctor about it. If they ignore you and don't answer your questions, go to a different doctor. I will always appreciate the ENT who found my son's submucous cleft. None of the other doctors before that bothered to do a nasal endoscopy. Shame on them for that.