Jay, I think you’re being unfair to TPM - I thought it was the best of the prequels. The CGI in the movie was better done as well when compared to TFA. For example, there are two prominent CGI characters in TPM - Jar Jar Binks and Watto. Jar Jar is a bit of a silly character only there to provide humour for the film, but Watto is more serious as a slave owner. In my opinion, Watto looks more photo-realistic than the CGI characters in TPM which as you say belong in a Harry Potter movie. When using CGI it’s best practise not to zoom it to fill the frame, but with Snoke JJ just puts it right in the frame to pull us out of the suspension of disbelief. Even movies that used practical effects used tactics to build the audience up for a reveal of an extreme special effect. For example, in Robocop Verhoven didn’t show the full suited Peter Weller at first - first they show his vision, then they show him from a distance but obscured. So that the audience would accept what they saw.

I showed Robocop to a friend of mine a few years ago, and he kept remarking about how he couldn’t believe that it’s a man in a suit. To quote him it didn’t look like it was possible to fit a man inside the Robosuit. And that’s a credit not just to the special effects team, the director, and the editor - but also to the actor who was able to create believable mechanical movement in nothing more than a rubber and fibreglass suit. One of the parts of TFA I liked was that jerky mechanical movement of the Millennium Falcon’s weapon chairs. That looked really good, it looked authentic. But as for Snoke he looked like he belonged in the Special Edition, or in Harry Potter.