To be honest both have the same amount of distracting fan service and poor writing. At this stage R1 bothers me more because retconning the exhaust port from a flaw to a feature is so lazy.
The R1 novelization shows that the exhaust port was rushed to approval, as a quick fix for the reactor overheating, because the project was behind schedule.
The exhaust port wasn’t retconned, but rather the reactor. Erso didn’t tell them to shoot a torpedo through the exhaust port, he told them to find a way to blow the reactor. They still needed to study the plans to find the way to the reactor. If the exhaust port was a feature, as Mocata alleges, they wouldn’t have need to steal the plans, because erso could have just told them about it.
Disney Canon: The exhaust port was one of three solutions Galen proposed to the reactor problem, so he was responsible for it, but still didn’t tell anyone. (Source: R1 novel)