I don’t think Gray Jedi is the solution. You can’t say the side that destroyed planets, purged races, and slaughtered children are half the good guys now, and the people doing everything to stop them were partially in the wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
Just because the Jedi and Sith can experience the Force can’t mean they can know it perfectly or wholly. A most robust understanding of the Force may lie along a higher synthesis of their philosophies.
As one reviewer commented, the concept of The Force was very vague in SW77 - and that was it’s strength. Christian, Buddhist, Neo-Pagan etc. could all see their own religion in it. The more specific you get the more you are going to diverge from some people’s beliefs. The basic tenants of The Force we get from SW77: trust/believe in yourself, think of others/the greater good, take risks, technology isn’t everything. Simple and beautiful.
In addition to the above, the dark and light sides should’ve been conceived as states of mind rather than innate attributes/divisions of the Force itself. That’s where I feel TESB started going off the rails.
Using power for selfish reasons IS the darkside. Does that really need to be elaborated on further in a Space Opera?
I don’t disagree. But perhaps my argument’s getting muddled.
There’s the Force as I feel it should’ve been, and there’s the Force as it is. The Force should’ve been an innately positive (or neutral) Force which still could’ve been misused by people with bad intent. The Force as it is is a dualistic Force. Since we’re stuck having to deal with the dualistic Force, we have to find ways of interpreting that dualism through a lens appealing to us. The consensus believes that you can’t dip toes in both positivity and negativity without eventually defaulting to one; I believe otherwise. But again, I’d prefer not to view the Force through a dualistic framework to begin with.