I agree. That said, I think this would be the one place where Kim’s music might actually work. It is supposed to be this epic but also emotional moment, and having watched this clip I’d say using Kim’s music is better than William’s.

I think the biggest problem is the pacing. Yes, emotional manipulation is an issue but that can’t really be avoided, this is supposed to be the final battle. But the pacing is really rough. There is no downtime between “we’ve lost” to “there are more of us!”. The film needs to breathe at this point to get it right.

So comparing this to the scene let’s be real we all know TROS was inspired by, look how much time eclipses between the “we’ve lost” moment to the “everybody’s here!”. There’s this tension that’s slowly building as the heroes gather together. It’d be so jarring otherwise (as we see in TROS).
https://youtu.be/xp2YlHPAyVI?t=62

So in short, I used Luka Frik’s edit as a base and gave it one small scene between the “we’ve lost” moment and the “big celebration”. It’s the moment where the First Order is questioning what’s happening (with some ROTS music for good measure). I think it works really well here, the sound mixing isn’t perfect but I can fix that over time.

MY ONE ADDITON: https://vimeo.com/422031021
(password is fanedit)