I understand it retroactively isn’t as much of an impactful event because he isn’t the “big bad” of the trilogy anymore. But when you have such a powerful villain die so easily in the second movie of a trilogy, it is to be expected that he would be diminished in such a way. Otherwise, the final movie in the trilogy has less stakes than the second one. That’s just bad storytelling in a trilogy.
Not to drag this point out any longer - Hal’s already made up his mind what’s going into V2 - but I do want to touch on this. You say it’s bad storytelling that “the big bad” was killed in the second film; the thing is though, Snoke wasn’t intended to be the ultimate baddie. Kylo was. That’s what Rian Johnson intended; and based on Trevorrow’s script, it’s what Disney originally intended. Heck, J.J. didn’t even decide to bring Palpy back until he started working on TROS. And Snoke wasn’t anything more than a cameo in TFA - from the beginning, this was supposed to all be about Kylo’s story. The “Skywalker’s” story. That’s why they killed Snoke - to set up Kylo Ren as the ultimate villain.
To me, bringing in the Emperor at all throws a huge wrench into the story. Saying Palpy was always secrectly, directly conntected to Snoke just adds even more turbulence to that wrench. You can jump through all of the mental gymnastics that you want; and if it feels satisfactory to you, then I’m genuinely happy that you feel that way. But let’s not pretend this was always the filmmakers’ intention.
But let’s save that discussion for Rey Nobody, eh?