I did play around with removing ochi, Lando and the dagger up until Rey is in Kylos quarters but you have to remove so much if the movie that I felt it was too short. Without extra deleted scenes it’s tricky to remove that awful macguffin without losing a large chunk of the film.
Yeah, I agree with you there. It’s tough to split TLJ into the other films too because the arcs are so tightly paralleled too. If only there were more substance in Abrams’ films to flesh out.