The more I think about it, the more I think the film would actually be stronger if it didn’t try to retroactively come up with a backstory for Snoke. Getting rid of the Snoke Clone vat really does go a long way to making the scene more vague and mysterious, and therefore, more palatable than the obtuse “SNOKE WAS A CLONE! SEE??” reveal; but what’s to say that Palpy isn’t just taking over from where Snoke left off? Snoke tried to rule with the First Order. He failed. Now Palpy is swooping in to claim it all for himself. If anything, that makes more sense why Palpy just magically appears with the Final Order fleet. If he was behind Snoke all along, why didn’t he give the First Order the new ships sooner?

Perhaps we could replace the line “I made Snoke. I have been every voice…” with something like “Snoke was weak. I can give you so much more…”

It’s really a matter of whether people want to be told the facts outright, or to maintain a bit of mystery and ambiguity in the story. People who prefer the former, yes, would want to be told, “Palpatine made Snoke. That’s how he connects to the previous two films.” Cut and dried. People who prefer the later wouldn’t care about the semantics and would prefer that the details be left up to interpretation - allowing the film to focus on its own story, rather than fleshing out things in the past that are no longer relevant. Neither perspective is inherently wrong, so I guess it just depends on which side Hal sits.

It reminds me of the recent series of Doctor Who, where they tried to definitively state the Doctor’s backstory. Many viewers, such as myself, think the show is more engaging when the Doctor’s history is more mysterious.