Since I’m already invested in creating a dream sequence of Luke’s island with imagery from TLJ, I could go all-in and use a substantial part of her hiking up to Luke from the end of the film. We could even see Luke’s face in the dream, and her offering up the lightsaber. Changing this to a dream would, I think, make it less jarring that the sequel has a different look and tone entirely, since TFA is more idealistic and TLJ is more realistic.

It might be kind of weird to have her utterly reject the lightsaber in Maz’s basement only to have it in the dream, however. But if this works, it would allow me to remove that sequence from the end of the film and end it like DigMod’s edit.