I was thinking about your planned edit of turning DJ into the codebreaker, and I realized something: if you’re keeping the character who was originally supposed to be the codebreaker in the movie, wouldn’t you need to get rid of his red plom bloom? At the very least, you’d need to recolor it. I’m just worried someone would watch the movie and think “Wait, that random background character also has a plom bloom? Are there two codebreakers or something?”
Good catch, but thankfully, it’s really not visible in the movie outside of the insert shot of it on his lapel. In the wide shot it’s too small and quick to see, and in the midshot, it’s conveniently framed out.
Also, I feel like you’d need to remove Maz’s line about the codebreaker “rolling on a high-stakes table”. It feels like it creates a bit of a contradiction, with Maz saying that the codebreaker is a rich classy guy and him turning out to be a bum in prison.
Maz never actually says he’s classy or rich in that scene; just that he’s an expert codebreaker, a good gambler, good with a blaster, and good at sex, all of which tracks with DJ. Remember, in TFA, Maz hangs out with a seedy crowd. To me, the more jarring concept is that in the theatrical version, this type of codebreaking is so expert and difficult that Maz only knows of one other person in the galaxy who can do it, and then a third person just happens to stumble into their path in a giant coincidence.