Lest we forget, the concept art for TFA was far more interesting than what we got, so it’s really difficult to even speculate on the look of the final result.
The TFA art is illuminating as well, because you have, for instance, let’s say five or so distinct concepts for what kind of planet Jakku might be. So even if the film did completely follow through with a cool piece of art it necessarily will not be able to satisfy every concept.
Yeah, but the concepts we’ve seen so far look pretty faithful to Trevorrow’s script. Remember that the art of TLJ was almost exactly like the theatrical movie, and no matter what your opinions on that movie are you have to agree it looks awesome. And I don’t just like the script because of the cool visuals, I like it because of the characters and the plot too. The plot of TROS is a hot mess, and no amount of editing would be able to fix it in my opinion. So I think this version of IX would be much better than the theatrical version.
My issue is that you are describing it as a “hot mess” with no details. Where did it fail and how? I am truly curious where you think it failed exactly. I could call TFA a hot mess, but I know exactly why and exactly why it bothers me. (and it partly is from things that were leaked that sounded cool in the leak but were badly edited in the final cut).