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.
I feel that the saga requires that epicness because of its roots. Yes, some of the great moments are the quiet ones. But the story is of good and evil on a galactic scale. I always tie it back to its origins in Flash Gordon. Ming kept coming back over and over. You think he’s dead? Think again. Because of that I was more than okay with Palpatine’s return because it is in that spirit and it did create that epic level story. And I don’t know why so many are upset that the work of the OT heroes 30 years on is threatened by something new. That is part of the structure. Nothing lasts forever and what we see in the ST is a world where Leia helped rebuild the republic, but it has issues (and doesn’t seem to listen to her as often times happens to heroes of the past). We have planet destroying tech in the very first film so having it crop up again only makes sense. The tech exists and some new fool is intent on using it again. So I don’t feel that what we got really had any issues. I think TFA had issues and I think TLJ and TROS ran with what was started and did they best they could from a rocky start. I think the end result is better than the PT. So what if some things are recycled. If you really look at it, the PT recycled quite a bit of the OT itself so the ST doing the same thing is just following the template. I think they varied it enough to create a unique and interesting trilogy. But I don’t feel that what I’m referring to as epic and the repeated story beats have any link. I think that a really creative person could have come in and crafted a unique story that would be epic enough. I don’t think we got that really creative and different story, but we got something that was different enough and epic enough to be worth it.
And I only read Zahn’s trilogy once, when it first came out. So I may be confusing things, but I didn’t read that many of the novels. I felt they went off on odd tangents and the great enemy they created just never seemed in keeping with the Star Wars theme. An alien invasion of the Star Wars galaxy isn’t as epic as some new dark side threat. And rechecking the story content on Wookiepedia, Zahn did have a clone, just not of Palpatine. The later EU had a whole slew of clones of Palpatine causing trouble until he was eliminated. Like some other things, I think that Abrams and co drew on the EU for ideas. I think what they ended up with was in the spirit of the EU but done much better. Though I do wish they’d thought of the stormtrooper rebellion and planted the seeds in TLJ. That would have been a cool thing to see play out over the later two films. Instead we just have an echo of it. But the EU writers did understand epic and wrote a lot of stories that do exactly what you don’t like about the ST. Lots of rebels vs. Empire redos. With the EU spending so much energy on that, I’m not surprised the ST went that way as well. The ST is kind of a best of EU compliation. And set 30 years after ROTJ, it is long after most of the EU stories were set, so they gave the Republic a lot more years of peace than the EU did. Not saying the EU was any good, just that a lot of fans were expecting something like that and the ST delivered with lots of story points right out of the EU. Clone Emperor in a dying body (because the clones couldn’t contain his power), a fleet of ships, more deadly planet killing weapons, Sith acolytes serving the Emperor, young Jedi, other evil force users, other clones. Quite a bit is missing, but the high points of what we got are just creatively repurposed form the EU.