I personally was surprised at how much I cared about the characters, even with so little time to focus on any of them. Take a movie like The Dirty Dozen, whose characters are spread thin, whose names I couldn’t remember at the end of the film, but how I connected with so many of them and was saddened as they were killed off one by one. The Dirty Dozen is nearly universally appreciated in spite of the exact same “shortcomings” as Rogue One. I thought both were great movies that did very well at creating several likeable characters in a relatively short amount of time.