I enjoyed TFA. It was a rehash of Episode 4 yeah but wasn’t that kind of the point?
I found it to be more a re-telling of all three OT films…
This is pretty decent in explaining why (just for consideration) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pueu2wu0M5s (and only 3 minutes long - and also saves me typing out a lot of words! 😉)
I can understand why they went for that - Disney had paid $4b for the franchise, and likely didn’t want to take financial risks with their 1st SW film - whilst also wanting their new films to be of a standard, feel and quality more akin to the Original Trilogy, than the Prequels. Get the familiar beats in there, a director who’d done well with rebooting a tricky Star Trek franchise, and a ton of PR bigging up - and paying homage and tribute to - the Original Trilogy.
And THEN evolve the films in the following stories/films - taking more chances (ie, Rogue One - where the theme, content, style and ‘modernisation’ - as well as aspects not previously shown before, ie the ‘grey’ or dark’ in the Rebellion - the unpleasant face of the Alliance) - with later films.
Here’s to a somewhat different story to what we have seen before with Star Wars in The Last Jedi… 😃