I think the new books have the clue. They have spent time building a contingency plan that Palpatine put in place that led to the rise of the First Order. So the First Order is Palpatine’s doing, not Snoke. Snoke just took over. And not only did Kennedy and Abrams have Lucas’s treatment for the ST, but they even brought the man himself in to help them steer this movie to a proper saga conclusion.

One thing that really irks me is blaming the parent company. I have seen not one shred of evidence that Disney had dictated anything to Lucasfilm regarding this trilogy. What I have seen is that a lot of the complaints blame Disney and are then found to have come from Lucas himself. I know some fanboys don’t like Rey, but she was basically Lucas’s invention. I think Palptine coming back will have more significance than just a big bad for the ending. I don’t think he will play a role beyond Rey and Kylo’s story. Kylo idolizes Vader and thinks that he is going to finish what Vader started, but everything that happened in the PT and OT was Palpatine’s plan, not Vader’s. What will happen when Kylo finds that out? Finds out that Vader was just a tool Palpatine used. They are saying (and if it is like Lucas’s sayings, you know how accurate that is) that Palpatine coming back was in the plan from the beginning (meaning they had a plan and TLJ’s middle chapter was not full of random Rian Johnson events) so I think we can blame this idea firmly on George. I think that Kylo needs to confront Palpatine and Anakin (as ghosts probably) to come to terms with who he is and what direction his life needs to take. What Kennedy, Abrams, Lucas, and Terrio actually do could differ greatly, but the last two films have a lot of hints that Kylo is trying to be dark but really isn’t.