While I continue to work, one question’s popped out that’s worth asking the community:

In Children of the Force, there’s a fun scene where Sidious in hologram gets all excited about the force sensitive babies he’s had captured. Obviously, ideally this becomes the first (chronological) hint that he’s interested in collecting/harvesting force sensitives, as continued in Rebels, Mandalorian, and ultimately implicitly used as part of his resurrection.

In the original version of this scene, he talks about turning the kids in to ‘force sensitive spies, capable of viewing the galaxy from afar’, which is both not a very interesting use of the force, and also not really what he ends up doing with force sensitives.

You could maybe argue he’s thinking Inquisition there, but ultimately that’s not how he created the inquisition anyway.

So, right now I’ve got it so instead he talks about dreaming of a ‘force sensitive army, trained in the darkside, and my enemies will be helpless’. I think that’s both more ambiguous and more threatening, and I don’t think it necessarily conflicts with the rule of two since he’s not calling them Sith, and there’re examples of him using many different force users in his various plans.

However, what that version does do is still make it explicit, so it doesn’t leave much room to be interpreted as an investment in his eventual resurrection.

On the one hand, eventual resurrection is a more powerful reason to want force sensitives (and helps smooth out ‘somehow Palpatine returned’), but on the other hand generic ‘force sensitives in my employ’ is fairly threatening and meaty.