I would ordinarily agree with you Burbin - your idea makes the most sense in terms of storytelling, but we are working with extremely limited material in this movie. Which is why I’m leaning toward opposing anything that doesn’t have Rey related to Palpatine in some way. Anything else would simply have to cut too much out of the movie for my liking. Plus, I’m concerned about how the upcoming Rey movie will handle this issue. I think the idea we’ve come up with here is a solid middle ground between Rey’s parents being nobody and her still being a Palpatine. Because in no world is the “son” of the Emperor ever nobody. It also makes Palpatine’s return make 1000x more sense than what we currently have in Ascendant.
I just don’t see much gain from making these changes. You’re coming up with a very complicated backstory that doesn’t really fix much besides making it clear Palpatine didn’t actually have sex. I don’t see much difference between revealing Rey is a Palpatine clone homunculus and just revealing she’s her granddaughter, in fact you’re just skipping over Rey’s dad, who is canonically a Palpatine clone homunculus, so you’re just removing the implied familial relation but everything else is pretty much the same. This doesn’t address the core issue most people had with Rey Palpatine, which is how it undermines the entire buildup from the previous movies for a cheap reveal that comes out of left field, and how it basically erases the big revelation from The Last Jedi by adding a buch of extra backstory that goes entirely against it. If anything this change is more egregious since it goes into even more painstaking detail about how nothing in TLJ’s revelation was true at all.