Just out of curiosity I took a look through the old community survey I ran back a year and a half ago.
The vast majority of questions which got a very strong response in favour of a particular change match to changes in this edit - things like the Snoke vats and the timing of the Palpatine reveal, simplifying the Final Order, its fleet, and Palpatine’s motivations. There was also strong support to make Mustafar more obvious, to remove the lightspeed skipping, to change the mechanism for how the force dagger guided Rey, and to make some of the references to prior movies less jarring.
Notably different is that at the time the community really had an issue with Rey Palpatine as an idea, favouring Rey Nobody. There’s still an appetite for a Rey Nobody cut these days but it feels like many people have come around to it more in the last eighteen months, as various edits have been able to integrate the idea more smoothly across the entire sequel trilogy. I’ve certainly flip-flopped back to favouring Palpatine (for the sake of canon, really), so I’m glad we’ve been able to make such peace with it. Similarly there was some split on how Rey self-identifies at the end, but I think this edit does a great job of making the original ‘Rey Skywalker’ moment far more earned.
Thinking back to around that time, we’d just had jonh’s force ghosts scene released. I think that was a really crucial edit for this community, because it gave a lot of us the catharsis we wanted for that key moment, and you could feel the shift back to hope that the movie was salvageable via an edit, which redoubled peoples’ commitment.
There were a few more radical ideas back then which ultimately didn’t lift off - things like changing some of the planets to known ones from the rest of the saga, or making Rey’s force lightning gold. I’m sure there’s still room for them in other edits, but like TFA Restructured and TLJ Legendary, I think this edit has threaded the right balance in terms of adherence to canon. The big thing the survey missed (discussion had only just started on the idea at the time) was making the Skywalker saber cracked like Kylo’s, which I’m so glad got pulled off in the end.
Anyway, I found it interesting to think back to the time when TROS was still fresh and this edit was in the very early stages. It’s amazing how far it’s come and a lasting testament to all of the contributors here for their skill and persistence.