I don’t think fans really wanted another Luke, Leia, and Han trilogy per say. I know for me I just wanted something that respected them as characters and felt like a natural progression to where we last saw them. Instead it feels like a regression.
Luke - He ended Return of the Jedi as the last Jedi. In the Sequel Trilogy he ends his story arc no different from where he was during the end of the previous trilogy. The only difference is he’s now broken and depressed as he failed. I didn’t need Luke to be Superman but I do feel seeing him pass on what he knew to the next generation as foreshadowed by his talk with Yoda was an essential part of his character development that felt promised to be told. He could fail at first to convey a Fisher King like narrative but instead he fails and everything is given to Rey because the plot says so and not because she earned it. Luke could definitely fail at first after following the teachings of the Jedi that came before but it’s poorly written and conveyed.
Leia - She’s in the same position she was at the start of A New Hope. She’s leading the Rebel Alliance then and now she’s leading the Resistance. Her growth to becoming a senator and even Supreme Chancellor is squandered. She fails at being a mother.
Han - He’s back to smuggling and where he was at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. He doesn’t continue to grow and become a respected figure in the Republic as his arc in Return of the Jedi implied when he became a general in the Rebel Alliance. Instead he’s back to smuggling, failed as a father, and loss the Millennium Falcon for reasons. Everything he overcame is thrown out the window.
All of these issues stem from The Force Awakens decision to be a soft reboot. The characters are mostly delightful and fun but the problem is the story they’re going through has no sense of consequence or baring on what comes afterwards. Hardly anything in the film has an emotional payoff or point in viewing things retrospectively. It’s there just to look like Star Wars but it doesn’t actually feel like Star Wars as it serves no purpose in the grand scheme of things.
I was ready to explore a new generation of characters with the trio serving as mentors. I wanted to see the children of Han and Leia and if in the cards Luke. I knew though George wasn’t so keen on the Expanded Universe in part because he didn’t see Luke as having children. So Luke having a kid may not have been likely but he could have served as a surrogate type parent. Instead we’re following characters they’ve never met or don’t have a connection to them directly or indirectly. The Skywalker saga is about generations of the same family and suddenly not following them in favour of a “Nobody” then Palpatine just feels very anticlimactic.
You don’t need your heroes to become regressed failures to convey a good story to prop up a new generation.
This makes the white-hot outrage over Luke’s characterisation in TLJ even more laughable.
At the end of RotJ, Han and Leia are respected leaders and heroes to the New Republic. Fast forward to TFA and Han is back to being the scoundrel smuggler we were introduced to in the first movie, and Leia is back to being a Rebel leader, and thus we have two characters who made a 360° turn.
It’s strange how Abrams hasn’t received any backlash for this deliberate regression, but Rian Johnson gets all the blame for ruining Luke Skywalker.
Well, it wasn’t even Abrams who did that setup, it was George.
And I disagree that Leia is in the same place. Before she was trying to bring down the Empire and now she is trying to save the New Republic from the First Order. She is fighting the entire time to preserve what she had achieved. While some argue the wording of the opening crawls implies that the First Order had won, the fleet we see in the end of TROS shows that they had not yet won, just intimidated the various system governments.
Han was going to die in George’s version anyway (so was Luke for that matter). Abrams at least gave us a glorious scene for him to exit on. And it is far from pointless. Johnson has that event derail Kylo and it ultimately leads to his return to the light in TROS. So it is a pivotal scene for the characters. And face it, most of us wanted to see the Rogue Han Solo over a respectable Han Solo. It was a good character choice in many ways.
And ultimately when you come down to the myths and legends that Star Wars is built on, everything about the former heroes not still being on top of things falls perfectly in line. Han went back to what was comfortable, Leia is protecting the Republic like she fought the Empire, the fall of Kylo Ren and the destruction of his school has ripped off the veneer of mastery that Luke had put on to reveal the flaws in his character. Luke more than the others has become a different mythic figure. Not the wise old man waiting for the hero, but the disillusioned hero not ready to help the hero.