I 100% agree that there was an abundance of villains who could have slid into Kylo’s role post-redemption for both of them to face off against, and Palpatine didn’t HAVE to be done the way it was, it could have worked (and I figured the move was so bold that it HAD to be supported by a great take on how he came back, which was a mistake on my part, LOL) in other ways. The potential of this part 3 was abundant! A story where Hux goes completely barking mad and Kylo is redeemed on the way to Rey & Kylo finally taking him down could have worked. A story where Hux pursues his weird Force fetish as in Trevorrow’s script but instead of him comically trying and failing to lift a rock or whatever, THAT weird obsession leads to the resurrection of some ugly monstrous Palpatine-THING at his hands (w/ the help of the Knights of Ren, even) could have also been great. There were a lot of ways that could have gone, and I think a lot of discussion about TROS is going to by default end up a requiem for the failed potential, left unfulfilled. The point you made about Rey’s threat being her own insecurity and unsurety pushing her to the darkside is a great one! And I wish THAT had been made a little more concrete and was done a LOT more cleanly and effectively! And you can see how that’s sort of what they’re TRYING to do by “completing her arc” on Exogol, but it just doesn’t land because it’s all done so poorly, and it’s being sorta/kinda presented as PART of the same thing that leads to Kylo’s redemption, but the two aren’t really linked very strongly at all, and it ends up diminishing BOTH arcs in the end.
We’re both, when we’re not splashing around in the sadness of all this failed storytelling potential as presented in TROS, advocating for the same thing, really: A better, tighter, more clear and thematically satisfying resolution to Rey AND Kylo’s story. We disagree on how to get there in some pretty big ways, and you’re maybe a little more inclined to disqualify some options than I am, but really, we’re more or less starting from the same point: “This could have gone another way, a much more satisfying way, than how it was given to us.”
So far as the Reylo aspect goes, I do honestly feel like the only legitimate romance this trilogy ever had an honest shot at was Poe and Finn. That’s not just shipping wars stuff, those two actors were the only two to have anywhere near the sort of chemistry that Ford and Fisher had in Empire. So if you’re not going to actually get those two together and make the most out of the sparks they were throwing, then I think there probably shouldn’t have been a romantic element to the sequel trilogy AT ALL. To some degree, all the other possible pairings (Finn/Rose, Rey/Kylo, Rey/Poe) just didn’t have it, and it was palpable that it wasn’t really there.