…There is enough of a backbone of elements like these that do seem thought out…
That’s pretty much the one thing I’ll flat-out disagree with you on, mate lol. I don’t think the story was well thought out at all; and one of the things I love about Ascendant is that it actually provides much of the backbone that was missing in the theatrical (like when it sets up the galaxy rising up in the crawl).
I don’t see it as contradictory, the point of Poe’s arc is that he’s wrong, both in the theatrical and in Ascendant, to think the galaxy has given up. That there are other people out there willing to fight.
I do see where you’re coming from, and I think that would be a good way to take the film; but like Cap said above, I don’t think the film telegraphs that at all. In Ascendant, we have the crawl, we have the puppet show, we have (hopefully) the Kijimi rebellion…all of it feels indicative of the larger state of the galaxy. Even if Poe personally doesn’t stop to watch the puppet show, the film is telegraphing that these are the sorts of things happening everywhere. And as a field agent, Poe should be aware of this after a full year.
In order to effectively convince Poe that not one single person is out there fighting, the film would need to have a scene that shows him that. Maybe on Pasaana, he asks the squid people to hold off the stormtroopers for them so they can escape, but the locals all run away. We see Poe looking crestfallen and defeated. And then later we understand why he doesn’t believe anyone else is fighting. But the film has to show us why he thinks that. Why he thinks that, even if the audience already knows better.
As it is, there’s no setup for it, so it feels like a really naff bit of exposition. And like I said, he’s essentially saying the same thing now as he did in the original, just without the one or two lines that say “Everyone has given up!!” It has the same overall meaning, just cutting out the one blatant contradiction.