Not sure how to make you understand, I guess. None of those other things are happening in a vaccuum with regards to the story. Starting with Carrie’s footage needing to be repurposed, and further deciding to make her self-sacrifice the reason he turns as the justification for keeping Carrie’s footage is just that: The start. That’s the foundation the rest of the story (and most of the decisions afterward) follow from. Those are the first two cards pinned to the board, and they never came off.

“They’d just have found a different way to redeem him” is part of my point - they should have, especially if choosing a different way would have meant doing the right thing and not repurposing deleted scenes “to honor” Carrie, especially since the result achieved nothing close to legitimately honoring her. I’m not arguing they shouldn’t have redeemed him. But by tying his redemption to reusing Carrie’s deleted scenes, they removed a ton of options, many of which would have likely been better than what they wound up with as a result.

I also don’t understand why you’re giving them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to “not doing a CG Leia” when they actually did it, and word is the sequence was even longer initially. I guess if you want to simplify my biggest disappointment, it’s that I’m disappointed they even tried to sidestep her actual death by making her final performance in Star Wars a bunch of strung-together deleted scenes that never worked in the finished film. The movie (and the filmmakers themselves) would have been better served by not looking backwards so hard and by looking forward instead.