I think a lot of the film’s primary problems are due to making space for her deleted scenes as opposed to using that time to create new scenes. And Terrio’s “excuse” being valid or not, it still points to the idea that there are things this film couldn’t do because they were pre-occupied with keeping those deleted scenes. They boxed themselves in unnecessarily, and that box was extra small because they only had a few minutes of deleted scenes from which to build an entire plot around. Leia not being alive for this movie was never an option for Abrams and Terrio, and that rigidity was damaging to the film overall.

It was their first really big choice when it came to the storytelling, and they chose not to accept the truth of what had happened in 2016 and instead decided to look backwards as hard as they could and build everything else from that decision. It made for a dramatically unsatisfying character, and movie.