I also wish these sequel movies had more of a thematic connection to the wider saga. It would have been very poetic if the prequels were the fall of the Skywalkers, the OT was the rise of the Skywalkers, and the sequels were the legacy of the Skywalkers. Instead we got one boring OT rehash, one weird post-modernist take on the OT storyline, and one crossover fanfic where Palpatine meets the sequel trilogy characters. Hardly a cohesive trilogy, let alone a cohesive saga.
The problem with that is that doesn’t make for much of a story. If you want an ST that has the same stakes and style as the previous 6 films, you have to have some great evil threatening what the OT built. Timothy Zahn did it with clone Palpatines and Admiral Thrawn and his force inhibiting critters. To be epic enough and see if our OT heroes really did their job the ST has to threaten what they built in a significant way. We know on the Force side that Lucas basically came up with the Luke, Rey, Kylo (not a Skywalker) and Snoke structure and introcucing Luke at the very end of VII seems to have been Arndt, not Abrams. But we don’t know where either of them were going with the trilogy and if that would have been epic enough. Lucas has talked about the Whills, but no details. But for it to work and fit in, the ST has to endanger the results of the OT. The ST we got did that, though not to some people’s liking. Snoke being a clone and Palpatine’s puppet could have used some additional foreshadowing. To me it feels like a story development hiccough. They let Rian kill of Snoke because they thought Kylo was bad ass enough and then decided he wasn’t and needed something bigger. And thanks to Zahn, they had the ready made idea of a Palpatine Clone. Unless we actually get to see Lucas’s treatments (or even Arndt’s), we won’t know what the ST was going to look like before Abrams. Was it going to be epic enough? Was it going to work?
It seems like your biggest wish for a Star Wars movie is for it to be “epic”, when that was never what made the OT so appealing to so many people. The best moments in Star Wars have always been the quiet moments. Stuff like the binary sunset, and Darth Vader’s death. I think a more “epilogue” style sequel trilogy would be very much in that spirit. Much more OT style than Palpatine 2 with his 10,000 Death Stars making Return of the Jedi pointless.
P.S. I’m pretty sure Timothy Zahn didn’t write Dark Empire. He actively tried to distance himself from that storyline in one of his later books. Which just shows that bringing back Palpatine is probably not a good idea.