Here’s my train of thought with the Rose getting shot down idea.

During the skimmer approach, a few skimmers get shot down by AT-ATs. We get shots of the AT-ATs, CU shots of Resistance pilots, then wider shots of the skimmers getting shot down. We also have shots of Poe reacting to the losses, which makes him decide to turn back. Basically, I was thinking replacing one of the Resistance pilot close-ups with a close-up shot of Rose, to imply she got shot down. After her skimmer gets shot down, it cuts back to Poe and we hear Finn shout “Rose!” over the comms.

When Poe decides to turn back, people could infer Finn doesn’t want to give up also because he doesn’t want Rose’s possible death to be in vain, and if she is still alive, he wants to be able to give her a chance. One could have it where Poe is the one protesting when Finn raises his mic up instead of Rose. Just take a line of his from that moment and cut it short, or just him simply saying, “Finn!” I think one could just trim around Rose when needed.

If you want to keep the shot of him reaching her skimmer, you would need to cut the wide shot of the skimmers that shows them close together, and you also would need to space out the shot of him jumping out of his skimmer and then reaching Rose’s. There’s not a lot to work with at this point, but this is one idea I had:

Finn abandons his crashed skimmer.
The metal base door can be seen melting from the inside
Resistance reaction shots of base shaking.
Finn reaches Rose’s skimmer.

You would need to cut those shots out of the initial moments of Finn’s sacrifice run, and also replace the sound since that sacrifice music swell already begins by that point.

The pros to keep the moment is that, one, it is a character moment for Rose and Finn, you could keep the kiss and it seems more tragic than weird since Rose didn’t cause Finn to crash in this scenario, and you also can see the door actually get destroyed, which you lose by cutting this moment. At this point the heroes have tried everything they can and all seems lost.

Also, you could possibly use a 4K version of the “skimmers crashing into each other” shot and crop it to help hide the fact that it is two skimmers instead of one.

But like I’ve said, I think you can still go with this idea and still cut Finn reaching Rose’s speeder. Heck, if you had to cut that, you could also cut Finn getting out of his skimmer. That way we don’t know if Rose OR Finn are dead until Luke shows up, and hope begins returning.

Definitely not trying to tell you what to do, but I do think this is a moment that a lot of people have issues with, and it is interesting to see how it can be edited. I just would like to be able to retain as much of the movie as possible, since the more one cuts, the less things makes sense, like Rose being missing for the last ten minutes of the film.

Anyway, just giving you some stuff to think about! I’ll probably try all of this myself at some point too. In the meantime, I’ll keep an eye out of any BB-8 shots that might be useful.