Again, the big problem with devoting so much time and energy to a lot of these little fiddly details in the plotting is that even if those questions were answered satisfactorily within the narrative - it still wouldn’t be a good movie, would it?
If I put together a 1000 piece puzzle perfectly, but the picture I assemble with no missing pieces is of a broken mirror reflecting a junk-strewn yard… does it matter that all these fiddly details are there and accounted for?
the only notion I want to push back a little on in this ongoing discussion is that there are somehow ironclad “Star Wars Specific” rules that got broken here, and there aren’t, really. There are plenty of storytelling and filmmaking mistakes, and the normal sorts of things that happen to make ANY movie mediocre and uninteresting to sit through, but I don’t think most of The Rise of Skywalkers’ sins are specifically Star Wars related, and I don’t think if many of these grievances had been fixed prior to release, the reception would have been markedly different.
Star Wars tends to break its own “rules” with every movie anyway, and that’s good, honestly. They’re completely made up in the first place. So long as you can cleverly break them, with satisfactorily emotional results (even if the result is as surface level as “whoa, cool!”) then breaking “Star Wars” rules isn’t a big problem at all. Nobody’s going to Star Wars movies to see its rules upheld. They’re going to Star Wars to be emotionally engaged by the story being told. And that’s not really happening with Rise of Skywalker for a fair amount of its viewers.
The weird thing for me is/was that TROS somehow took me back to a time where ‘rules’ weren’t an issue - that time being 1980 and TESB. I can’t quite explain it, it was just a bizarre visceral thing that I haven’t experienced in a SW film since then. But the lore and canon are still a tangled mess for me. My wife joked - as we left the cinema after seeing TROS for the 3rd time! - that she could imagine me watching ANH followed by TESB followed by TROS as a kind of crazy machete order. She wasn’t necessarily wrong! Every criticism levelled at the ST (and the PT for that matter) I pretty much agree with in the general sense, but somehow my ‘canon-brain’ experienced TROS as if I’d been living in seclusion for 40 years and TROS just happened to be the sequel to some amazing movies I hadn’t seen yet. This probably sounds insane! For example I just watched Mauler’s takedown of TROS and I honestly can’t fault his points, but my fanboy brain wasn’t connecting those dots at all as I watched TROS. I’m obviously aware of Rey and Poe and Holdo and everything else, but during my viewings of TROS these things became vague notions rather than 'well Rey couldn’t be this and Luke wouldn’t do that and Palpatine couldn’t be X and the Force would never Y…". I think it was Dom who said in a thread that he experiences SW films individually rather than setting them against each other in terms of canon/consistency (hope I’m not misrepresenting you Dom!) and this was the first time it happened for me without my really noticing.
I thought watching TROS again might expose the cracks, but what it really made me notice was just how much TROS resonated/resonates with me as a defacto Revenge of the Jedi. So much of TROS is what I wish ROTJ had been - the chemistry between the leads, the emotional moments and redemptions, the environments, the temptation of Rey, the horrific nature of Palpatine etc etc. So like I said to Dre earlier, my obvious bias allows for this particular rehash to get a free pass for me! Sorry about the rambling…