Rey was lucky in being able to do the mind trick to escape.

How is that luck?

Of course, the poor treatment of the OT heroes could be excused or at least tolerated if the new heroes designed to replace them were well written characters you could get equally invested in. That’s really the key thing the whole ST hinged on. The ST characters had to be good enough for the “passing of the torch” to feel earned and satisfying.

The best recent example I can think of that nailed this aspect was Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse. I loved Miles Morales as a character, and his relationship with the older Peter Parker, and it was really satisfying to watch him finally take up the mantle as a true Spider-Man at the end. The movie earned that payoff.

Rey, Finn, and Poe weren’t written well enough for me to get invested in them. I liked the concepts behind Finn and Rey as characters, but the execution of those concepts was severely lacking. By the end of TFA, I’d lost interest in the new characters, which made the very character-driven TLJ a slog to sit through, and made the treatment of the OT heroes that much harder to swallow because it was done for the sake of the new characters.