I do agree with you Outbound, I think the Death Star II, Jar Jar, the Ewoks, Starkiller Base were bad ideas. I wish they wouldn’t have gone with them in the first place.
While I do think it is theoretically possible to make Starkiller Base just a base (I would like to see it done), or replace the Death Star II with something else, like a Super Star Destroyer (Snooker is doing it and I’m excited about the finished product), I think the farther we stray away from what we’re given in the films, the more subjective the changes become, which will make it harder to come to a consensus on those changes.
So for a lot of these issues, I try to look at it this way. “How can we make it work better within the story?”
Instead of removing an element entirely, what can we add, trim, change, shift to help improve the positioning of those elements.
I like this quote from the Phantom Editor discussing Jar Jar:
“Removing [Jar Jar] entirely from the story just wouldn’t work and I’ll defend that, it wouldn’t. Would I have chosen to tell this story differently without him? Yeah, but that’s not the case. The case is, it’s George Lucas’ film, it’s his story… Being an editor, you want to take what’s there and try and make it the best [version] possible, and I guess that’s what I was trying to do.”
I think that’s what makes TFA: Restructured work. They could have made Starkiller Base, not a giant laser, but instead of removing it completely they said, “Okay, there’s another Death Star. Removing it would be extremely difficult, so instead, could we improve its function within the story?” I think this is the approach that should be taken.
I think that JarJ needs to be removed and replaced with a non-racist caricature character.