So in almost every scene of the movie I had a knife twisting in my side about how bad this was and didn’t make sense. Makes it really hard to appreciate the good aspects.
You are seeing the movie as awful because you expect to see it that way. You have preconceived ideas about how the Star Wars Universe is supposed to work, whether you decided them on your own or were given them by EU. You feel the movie twisting a knife when that knife belongs to you.
You do not let the movies tell you a story on their own terms. You want it to be on your terms and are angry and frustrated that it doesn’t work that way. If you were willing to let the films tell their own stories and expand your understanding of the universe as you acquire more information about it, you would be able to accept and enjoy it.
But it doesn’t make sense that we could have sent people to walk on the moon because planes don’t crash into the ground when they fly in straight lines, so the Apollo missions must have been faked since we know the Earth to be flat.