I don’t understand this, or your obsession with the Chosen One prophecy. It seems like you think all the bad parts of Star Wars tie back to the prophecy, when I never interpreted it as a retcon of the OT. If anything, it actually enhances the OT characters’ accomplishments, by giving them a wider galactic context. But this is all subjective.
Firstly: it’s not an “obsession” and I don’t really appreciate the implication behind my bringing it up here in this conversation. It’s not an “unhealthy fixation” or anything, or at least not beyond any “unhealthy fixation” that prompts any of us to still be visiting web forums about Star Wars in 2020, haha.
You may disagree with it (you obviously do) but I think there’s nothing wrong with pointing out how and why the decisions made in the past affect the stuff we’re looking at here in the present, and despite the fact you don’t look at it as a retcon, it’s still a retcon. Retcon isn’t an inherently negative term, either.
Secondly: don’t think ALL the bad parts of Star Wars tie back to the prophecy, but I also think it’s pretty much inarguable that “The Prophecy of the Chosen One,” especially being introduced as the means for Anakin’s discovery AND fall AND redemption (which, again, didn’t become the central focus of the Star Wars saga until AFTER Return of the Jedi finished its theatrical run) is a key point of many of the other story decisions made in the prequels, and thus, many of the discussions (and arguments) people have on web forums about Star Wars regarding the Force, and Lucas, and “the rules” as they were.
People like to discuss this fiction as if it’s not fiction, and that’s a huge stumbling block. This isn’t a documentary that only Lucas has the ability to tell correctly. It’s a pastiche of myth and adventure stories, and it’s never actually had a singular author, no matter how fervently we’ve all fed into the myth that it did (and does, and should) It’s not original, and there’s tons of outside context to look at and take into account when talking about what Star Wars does and doesn’t do well.
Lucas’ ideas aren’t infallible, and if you’ve got room to improve them, and you’ve been given the green light to do that, then do it! Prophecy was a lazy conceit, applied haphazardly and fairly terribly. One of the unintended results is that the very nature of this hazy, vaguely-formed mystic fictional religion is JUST solidified enough for people to stake out positions and issue challenges based on their understanding of it.
This seems like it’s kind of a cousin to the recent conversations about Canon and its percieved importance, and a thing Lucas used to believe (I think it’s one of the things he learned from Roddenberry, in fact) is that canon doesn’t really matter, and if canon is a hindrance to making your story better, then change the canon, or disregard it. I think that if that’s what Rian did on TLJ, fine. Good.