JJ completely kneecapped Rian before Rian could even shout action.
We never saw a movie in canon take place immediately after the previous.
In star wars it has always been easy to make a character grow simply by letting time pass offscreen. Rian couldn’t do that, & while it would have been great to see atleast a year pass like Hal mentioned in his commentary so the change in atmosphere & things could have felt a little easier to accept.
I am happy with TROS (Hal’s edit remedies alot of my initial issues) it is literally this generations Return of the Jedi, and when you look at the movies from a production stand point they are very similar, so i am okay, kids will grow up and look at it as their ROTJ and that’s nice… but there is a part of me that wishes JJ would give the audience the middle finger and subvert the formula.
JJ has never made something that makes the audience think past the surface, and star wars doesn’t need to be so deep at times, but i would have killed to see something that made me feel different with each viewing.
For some reason I didn’t see this post before so I just wanted to come back here and say that these are my thoughts exactly!