That’s very much how I feel. It makes more sense considering that SOTME was originally planned as an outline for a low-budget TV movie sequel to SW in case it did only middling box-office business.

In fact, Lucas’ specification to Alan Dean Foster was that this was Luke and Vader’s big climactic duel, so Luke actually killed Vader in the original pitch. That obviously got changed because of the massive success of SW on film, but it makes nonsense of the story in Foster’s book.