It’s important to understand that, when it comes to liking or disliking a fictional space movie, morality has no bearing on a person’s opinion. Whether or not you like a space adventure movie says nothing about you as a human being, because it’s just a movie.
I remember after TLJ came out, and for the next couple years, there was a massive wave of articles by journalists that tried to either trivialize or vilify criticizers of the film. “It’s just Russian bots.” “It’s just a small group of racist trolls online.” “They’re not real fans, anyway. They’re just manbabies who don’t understand the true meaning of Star Wars.” I heard all of these repeatedly from journalists, with similar sentiments even being repeated by Lucasfilm employees. Of course, antagonizing your own customers is never a good idea, no matter how little you care about them. But the whole thing was so bizarre, I still can’t fully wrap my head around it.
That was because it was true (the part about Russian bots, trolls spammers - the racists, sexists and homophobes - we even had numbers of them on here). There is a massive disconnect between criticising and outing these fuckwits - and ‘antagonizing your own customers’, as you claim.
This is true, but it’s at least worth mentioning that there’s a vocal minority of trigger-happy ST fans who’ll happily lump valid criticism in with bad faith actors.
Then there’s the narrative problem: Luke dies with his major unfinished business—restoring the Jedi Order—unfulfilled and presumably transferred to Rey (only for Abrams to end the Saga with Rey not doing anything about it either). That’s an inexcusable, inexplicable omission, a failure to deliver on perfectly-rational fan expectations, and one major point on which the old Expanded Universe will always have an edge over Disney canon.
This is the one thing I think TLJ did to screw over Episode 9, Luke probably should have lived. Whatever. I kind of think this was a Bob Iger or Kathleen Kennedy decision, the higher ups wanted each ST movie to be dedicated to one of the OT trio, and it’s an interesting coincidence that each one dies in “their” movie. Not that this is a defense of TLJ killing off Luke, but it’s interesting and worth mentioning.