Haha, no worries about double posting! I just did it too.

I found what you were talking about.
“The flags are designed to drive superfans nuts with references to the earlier movies, but Abrams tells Guyett that too many of them allude to the first of Lucas’ prequels: ‘I don’t want to be too about podracers,’ he says. ‘I’d rather come up with our stuff.’”

That doesn’t really sound petty to me? I mean, he didn’t even say take them all out, he just want to do his own thing, imo.

Chiang is also a vice president of Lucasfilm as well, but I think he also respected JJ’s choices as director, if they were his own.

Now, I do agree with you that they probably wanted to stick closer to the OT designs because that is what they felt the fans wanted (and now they don’t want it), but personally I think it makes sense for things to be a little different but not that different. There hasn’t been any war in 30 years, so why would they develop extremely different fighter ships in that timespan?

And in my opinion, I think it had to be a another civil war-type situation to be a true continuation of the themes of the past six films. And outside invasion or something like would have felt really detached to me.
But you can see how subjective this gets.

EDIT: Frank is making a good point. We’ll probably just run around in circles and never convince the other on anything. Haha. I just the think the degree of cohesiveness in a movies series is really changes based off each individuals perspective. So might seem inconsistent to you and other people, but not to everyone. Just depends!