Eh I get that you’re excited about Rey redefining what means to be a Jedi but isn’t that exactly what Luke did/was expected to do post-RotJ??? I mean, they literally picked his character arc, re skinned it and just gave him anew character arc to fit in with the new Luke. So, in a way, Luke’s also just plot device. Only in a way though.
That’s not entirely true. Yoda wanted Luke to ‘pass on what you have learned’, implying that the Jedi would come back, or return, as they were before the purge. There was no talk of ‘redefining what it means to be a Jedi’. In TLJ, Luke explicitly states that the Jedi should end, and specifically avoids teaching Rey the rules and dogma of the Jedi. She really is free to make her own way.
Yeah but Luke learned things so differently than the Jedi from the past. He was the Jedi that Vader wanted to be and the council wouldn’t let him because of the Jedi code. Luke knew nothing of the code and strict rules and habits of the old Jedi. He had his idea of what being a Jedi really meant, and he was going to pass THAT on. But apparently he decided to become a pond of the Jedi council, ultimately failing and making his Jedi Order seem like a WW1 to Rey’s Jedi Order being WW2. (In a sense that WW1 is the “forgotten” war and WW2 the “important” one)
At the point of the OT, both Yoda and Obi-Wan had more loose views on the Jedi code too, and that’s what they taught Luke, and even so Luke challenged them and did what he thought was right, becoming the “best Jedi”.
That’s always been my understanding of it, what I thought had happened. That’s one of the main reasons why the new Star Wars got mixed feelings from me.