The whole child-soldier thing really bugs me about the ST. In the OT - I felt the battle between the empire and the rebels was fairly morally unambiguous. The empire was evil - the people fighting for it were likely culpable. But the element of recruiting child soldiers in the ST really makes me feel bad for the Stormtroopers and Officers who are killed.
I think this idea could be taken two different routes:
Option A) Remove any implication of stormtroopers being child soldiers. Since the films never address that fact, it would be better to make the stormtroopers more responsible for their allegiance. It also might make Finn’s defection have a little more impact, since he presumably made the choice to join them in the first place. Also, Finn’s seems to have pretty normal social skills for a child soldier, and we never have to see him be deprogrammed from all the propaganda he must have grown up hearing. It definitely would’ve been interesting to see Finn and Poe at odds with each other because of their assumptions about the other faction, but then slowly form a mutual respect. Instead, they’re friends instantly.
Option B) Keep stormtroopers being child soldiers, but alter Finn and Poe’s blaster effects in IX to make it seem like they are stunning stormtroopers rather than killing them. This would at least make it seem like they are aware of the implications of their actions, and are actively trying to avoid killing people who were child soldiers, just like Finn. And you could potentially give the Sith troopers clone voices as well. Technically they’re child soldiers, too, but they weren’t taken from a family like Finn and Jannah were.
It would also be nice if you could imply that Jannah and the other troopers were inspired by Finn’s defection. She could say, “We laid our weapons down, like you.”
Also, instead of Finn saying, “It’s real. I wasn’t sure then, but I am now”, I think it would be nice if Finn said something like, “This is where we belong. I wasn’t sure then, but I am now.” I honestly feel like there is so little payoff to Finn’s force stuff, it would be better to keep his scenes focused on Finn’s trilogy-long arc of finding something to fight for. Plus, it implies that Finn has now recruited the defected stormtroopers, who were inspired by Finn’s own defection. Unfortunately a lot of this is implied off-screen, but I think it is the closest we can get to Finn’s stormtrooper rebellion with the footage we have.