And while the song you bring up is not one I really care for, it was a #1 hit.
I think a lot of this really is about taste. I don’t care for Avatar but as you brought it into the mix I feel like the same logic you’ve used could all be said in defense of that movie, that maybe it seemed the same to you but there were a lot of new innovations, and it was a very compelling event at the time that felt fresh to many. Even when you say pulling characters directly from other films I think that’s getting back to the same finger pointing you could dish back at ANH.
That is TFA. You see the similarity, but the rest is something else.
Somewhere in the middle there’s complete agreement here, that you can see something similar (which we have been over also isn’t inherently bad but that’s where I’m calling taste), but from there it has its own path, own new characters. For myself that new path is still fairly undefined and the ratio of similar to new leaned too far into the former category, the combination making it difficult to follow the ST as its own story.