I think the biggest issue I had is that Han and Leia’s story was over. Finished. When you write a story, or film one on screen, you have characters, and these made-up characters in theory have entire lifetimes of events. But story is about finding only the most relevant period of time in their lives, the most interesting events, and only getting into all of that. Nobody cares what they ate for breakfast yesterday or what they did at band camp when they were 10 years old unless it’s relevant to the story.
Han and Leia were relevant and interesting in Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. That was the crux of their mythological lives. If you want to make them centerpieces of a new story when they are in their 60s and 70s, you have to make a different kind of movie than the lighthearted popcorn flick that is TFA. You can’t just call Leia a general and throw her in a few scenes. You can’t just take dinosaur Harrison and have him show up not taking his role seriously. You need to make a credible movie revolving around them, or you need to have them play supporting roles in a movie that revolves around the new, younger cast, telling their own story. You can’t split the movie between both, which is one of the fundamental problems I found with TFA.
In the end, I think the film would have been much better if it moved Han into the background and made the story more about Rey and the younger generation. The whole Han-Leia-Kylo family plot is out-of-place melodrama that was only artificially contrived in order to justify the unwarranted screen time for Harrison.
Whatever I may think of the film, I think TFA’s biggest flaw was Harrison Ford. Not his acting or anything he did himself necessarily, but just the effort that was made to accommodate him and tailor the movie to him and old fanservice-y people who wanted to see him and the old gang. The old characters and the new characters and their stories are not organically synthesized. There is no natural story there that the filmmakers wanted to tell. It was all just make up a bunch of action hero movie bullshit and put all the people on screen as much as possible. And I don’t think that’s the formula for a good movie, or not one that I enjoy.