Here’s why the “a little planning” argument fails out:

The problem with The Rise of Skywalker is that the guy who was hired to come in and “fix” it to Lucasfilm’s satisfaction was completely uninterested in following any plan. Including his. Plans only have any worth if someone chooses to follow them. And Abrams wasn’t going to follow it. He didn’t even follow his own.

So you have a creative who doesn’t care about any plan (even his own) and executives unconcerned with making anyone adhere to that plan. Lucas was very much the same way. Guiding visions sound noble but if the person doing the guiding isn’t GOOD AT IT then you still wind up with more bad movies than good.

Plans aren’t laws. Especially not in a creative area. There’s a reason screenwriters are lowest figures on the filmmaking totem pole, and it’s not because they don’t know how to stick up for themselves.

Sometimes movies are just bad because the creatives making them don’t make the right decisions. It’s not a conspiracy or anything. Guiding visions and plans in place are security blankets for fandom. They’re not foolproof ways forward to making good movies, and there aren’t even really that many examples to prove the strength of that assertion anyway. Not that it matters. Security blankets can’t really protect you from monsters, either. But it feels like they can, and that’s THEIR worth.