I personally think most of the issues people point to are fairly surface-level stuff that doesn’t really damage the movie as a whole. A second Death Star makes sense in-universe.
Return of the Jedi is a great movie, but I kind of think this is a stretch. The last one didn’t work, why would a second one with essentially no changes work this time? Palpatine gets a surprise attack on the Rebels I guess, but he still dies, they still lose the Sanctuary Moon, and the loss on Endor doomed the Empire.
Just because your expensive military hardware is destroyed in a battle, you do not simply stop making that hardware. When a country lost a capital warship during the World War I or World War II, they did not just say “oh that did not work, let’s stop building new ones” or “oh that did not work, let’s just stick to building small torpedo boats instead”.
If capital warships were incredibly expensive and had a well known, easily exploitable weak point that leads to total, irreparable destruction, they probably might have said that.
Except that the weak point you refer to was not well known (it took Alliance a great effort to find out about it), and it was not easily exploitable (without a pilot with rare force abilities it was impossible to do it, as clearly shown in the film).
By Return of the Jedi, it was well known, and it’s clearly easily exploitable because they easily exploit it the second time.
And besides, who says they did not fix it for the DS2?
The indie arthouse kino filme known as “Return of the Jedi”
The only reason why ships could fly inside it was because it was only 1/4 finished by the time of ROTJ.
In other words, not fixed. Edit: Or, as Yotsuya says, you could view it as them replacing one easily exploitable weakness with another that’s even worse. But if you take Rogue One’s word for it (maybe you do maybe you don’t), they literally did jack to fix the problem.
No matter which way you slice it: The core of the Death Star was too easy to put bombs inside of. Fair mistake, people harp on ANH too much for it. You have to exhaust heat somehow, and it literally took magic powers to take down the First Death Star. But they made it a thousand times easier for the Second. No excuse.
This is an extremely silly argument. It is basically like saying that a car model does not have wheels and doors, while looking at an unfinished example at the beginning of production line in a factory. Of course, unfinished DS2 had weaknesses, but it was not designed to be unfinished…
Now going to my analogy, unlike DS in Star Wars, real-life incredibly expensive capital warships (i.e., battleships) did actually have several well known, easily exploitable weak points, i.e., against attacks from relatively inexpensive aircraft or torpedo boats. Yet they were still building them for decades after those weak points were evident.
I’m no military tactician, but I imagine it’s because they aren’t actually easily exploitable. At least, I hope not. Because if they are actually sending capital warships with weaknesses so easily exploitable they get murked before they manage to even do anything (like the DS2 did), military waste is a much, much bigger issue than I thought it was.
In general military is huge waste of money purely from economy point of view. Most weapons that are built are never even used once. But in rare cases when you need them, they might save your country. Same with the battleship type of warships. Even though they were proven completely useless, they could have somehow turned out critical in some unforeseen situation, therefore countries could not gable with its safety. In the end, hindsight is 20/20.