I also have my reservations about that. But I guess that what stands against Leia’s space sequence outbids what stands for:

it looks ridiculous
it doesn’t pay hommage to Carrie Fisher at all (it’s even quite insulting to fail that much what should have been her most important scene in the Saga)
it has absolutely no impact on the movie (Ren doesn’t shoot, what does it mean in the movie ? Well: nothing. Leia exposes to everyone her Force sensitivity, what is the payoff in the rest of the movie ? Well: nothing. This entire sequence is 100% useless, even Lucas didn’t fail that much during the PT era)

But yeah: next Leia we’ll see will probably a “Laurence Olivier/Gladiator” version of her, so I understand Hal’s feeling about keeping that scene intact, a very hard call, but in the end the edit is his. The thing is that this scene is probably going to be a real deal breaker for many people, so I hope someone will take Hal’s edit and implement into it the best space Leia’s removal possible !