I agree with you Dom. I really like Thrawn, but I think the new films are much more tied to the themes of all of the other films than the Thrawn trilogy was.
How do you figure? TTT was not really thematically rich, but it was a logical contiuation. IMO the ST flows neither logically (The New Republic as an organization dies with a handwave) or thematically (Luke unlearned the lessons he learned in the OT).
Things have happened in between these two films, and TFA begins in medias res, just like ANH did.
IMO the big problem with this is that unlike ANH in 1977, TFA is a sequel to movies that exist. It feels artificial to muddy the A to B when the A already exists.