Yesterday I had an idea for a very radical edit and I wanted to share my thoughts with you.
Since I am no fan of palpatines return or Exegol for that matter, I have been thinking what the Way-finders might be apart from a TomTom for the Sith. What if the Way-finders were the dark side equivalent of those Jedi-Holocrons that contain lists of future Jedi?
But instead of charting force sensitive children, these list contain those that are easy to manipulate by the Sith and were used by Snoke to build the FO.
In order to remove Palpatine, the movie would start with Reys training and during that she will see Kylo through the force. Kylo is on Mustafar fighting who will now be Snokes most loyal servants to retrieve the artifact from Snokes palace. (it fits that it is on Mustafar, since he has a ring bearing ore from underneath Vaders castle) Rey will indentify the artifact as something she saw depicted in Lukes notes (can’t think of a better way to get them moving to Pasaana, sadly) and the plot continues normally.
After Ach-To Rey would join the space battle in Lukes X-wing, sending a signal that a) assembles the civil fleet and b) broadcast the list with the stolen children, causing many star destroyers throughout the FO fleet to cease fire.
Apart from these major changes, I would like to make some changes to the Death Star battle and the aftermath, yet I don’t know yet, how to achieve this. Anyways I think that after TLJ Rey should learn to take responsibility for her own actions as she has internalized by now that she is her own person. There are a few options to build on this theme. Firstly Rey should actively decide to take Lukes lightsaber. Then Chewies survival should either be postponed or cut. And finally Leias death shouldn’t enable Rey to stab Kylo, but rather her rage. Due to this incident she decides to go to Ach-To, speaks to Luke (although, please let the saber burn) and then has to confront Ben one last time, asking for the artifact, which in this version he wouldn’t have left in his ship. The last part is the difficult point, because I don’t know how to pull it off. (maybe a force time conference?) Yet it would conclude her journey towards taking responsibility very well.
P.S.: another little character twist related to the list-artifact-idea would be to reveal that Finn a) hasn’t been abducted by the FO, but joined them voluntarily or b) used to do civil service within the FO and joined the military voluntarily. Anyways the list-option would give Finn some more personal motivation for the quest.