I agree to an extent with most of the criticisms but unlike OP and a lot of others who share them, I don’t hate the films at all just as I didn’t hate the Prequels either… TLDR I agree with the criticisms though that doesn’t make me hate the new films just like my criticisms of the Prequels didn’t make me hate them either. I love Luke’s display of Force Mastery at the end and I don’t mind what they did with Snoke. My issue lies more in the over arching story. It definitely should have been New Republic versus First Order. I’ve written new opening crawls for both TFA and TLJ that emphasize the role of the New Republic, acknowledging its presence as if it hasn’t been completely destroyed. From there, the only edits that need to be made are to the few instances where they imply “no one is coming”. No, fuck that, the New Republic absolutely would be coming but they just can’t get the signal far enough or something to that effect. That’s about the best you can hope for. The rest would basically be a fan film, not a fan edit.
Yeah, I get all that and mostly, if not completly, feel the same but…like you said, the over arching story is a problem. For the most part, there is none and if there is anything at all that you can think of, there is no progress, change or learning curve for characters happening at all. Which is why I feel like the sequels need to be heavily edited (one of quite a few reasons). TLJ is a huge example of this and the ending is so final feeling that there is no next objective for anyone to be excited for the next film except “kylo has to die/convert to the light side”. Of course, this was the same objective as in previous middle chapters but there was much more pilled on top of that.
It seems like Disney are more concerned of making each film it’s own thing and, if you look at each film as is, they are good as long as you don’t take them too seriously. Unfortunatly, some people do and find flaws. If you compaire character personalities, motivations, past story lines, galixy politics etc. that are all set up in previous fiilms, it doesn’t totally match up and sometimes not make sence. Plot points are dropped and forgotten about between films. Lots of decisions made for nostalgic reasons and not for actually making something new and good.
If you take a few flaws of the films so far:
-TFA was a copy of ANH
-Rey doesn’t have any training or need it at all but previous films say that you do. If the force can just make Rey stronger to balance out the light and dark (official explination apparently), why didn’t the force just balance out Luke so that he could kick vaders ass at the end of ep5?
-No large over arching story between films
These flaws are all fixed by doing the edit mentioned on page 1 - Have Rey trained in TFA and have the Resistance trapped on Crait at the end of the film. The more flaws you find and attempt to fix, the better the sequel trilogy could turn out. Just chaning the Resistance to the Republic and making it so that they cant get the message out on Crait doen’t fix the majority of flaws.