While I’ve washed my hands of the ST and all future SW films for the forseeable future, it’s hard for me to sympathize with these people. I’ll bet a sizable portion of them were the same smug, self-satisfied Lucas fanboys who mocked and heckled OOT purists just for wanting a proper restoration of the theatrical cuts. To that faction, I can only say: “Can you feel that, buddy‽”
Well one of these people is me and I want a OOT release, I liked the PT as a kid and still do with the right fan edit and I even liked TFA but I hate TLJ. So try categorising that 😉
“Non-standard non-purist”? 😛
I don’t doubt some of the signatories are the type of people you described but you can’t tar the entire group with the same brush as demonstrated above.
True. Still, I find the whole notion of creating a petition to strike a movie one doesn’t like from canon hopelessly immature and petulant. Now, I’m not a fan of official canon, and that’s been true since 2007; I don’t like most of the EU, I don’t like the SE or PT, and I don’t even like ROTJ. Yet never once did I entertain the notion of starting or signing a petition to get any of that decanonized; I’ve chucked out what I despise, replaced it with headcanon, and haven’t looked back since. If I can do it, they can do it.
tl;dr: These people have to get over themselves and stop treating official canon as something which actually matters.