These are the questions I’ve been fighting with as well all day.

In regards to the two options of the FO’s pulled punches, I prefer the ‘Kylo’s Mission’ angle, since it doesn’t present the First Order as incompetent. In the end, I expect that there will remain some of Hux’s incompetence, but it’s far better for the audience to wonder ‘What is the crazy space wizard’s plan?’ rather than ‘Why is Hux still in charge of anything?’.

I think Poe’s character arc would still work even with much of the first scenes truncated or eliminated.

The Hyperspace Tracking plot is the most intractable problem right now. With the current idea of cutting so many scenes in the beginning of the movie, Leia and Finn discussing the impossibility of the tracking would be cut in favor of having Finn know about this technology and revealing its existence to Rose. The issue which immediately arises is that he should have brought this to Leia’s/Holdo’s attention immediately upon learning that they were running from the First Order. Instead he brings this to Poe’s attention, but Poe decides against telling Holdo.

One tantalizing idea is that the ‘cloaked’ binary beacon is not so cloaked as the Resistance thinks. Combined with the idea of Rey being the one who gave the beacon to Finn on the sly, the scenes could easily be reworked to make it seem like Finn is trying to get the beacon off the ship to protect it from further tracking. Of course this falls apart when they make their plan to disable the tracker, since all they need to do is get the beacon off the ship to solve the problem.