I disagree strongly. Here are some of the numerous benefits to this change:
- It’s not a copy-paste of “I am your father”. Instead of the reveal simply being a relative is evil, the reveal is that you, as a person, are extremely evil in what is basically another life. Rey’s challenges can’t be dismissed as easily by Luke anymore because nobody has ever gone through what she is experiencing.
The thing is, it’s clear Rey is not a 1:1 clone of Palpatine, since, you know, she’s not a younger Ian McDiarmid. She would just have been a creation based off of Palpatine’s genes, at that point what’s the difference from being her decendant? Nothing says she’ll become just like him since she’s already not exactly like him.
Furthermore, and this is an issue that would plague any version of the film that implies a genetic relation to Palpatine: the villain of the movie isn’t Palpatine, it is the countless generations of Sith spirits that once resided within him and now inhabit his rotting clone. It makes no sense to imply Rey is destined to become evil just because she’s genetically related to Palpatine, when the reason he’s so evil are those countless spirits that took over him. This is also why I like the chosen one idea. I mean, it was prophesized the chosen one would “destroy the Sith”, and now we have a movie where the villain is the literal embodiment of all the Sith, it just makes too much sense.
- It makes it abundantly clear how Palpatine was resurrected. Ya know, the thing that people most take issue with in the film. As a bonus, it’s more heavily implied what Snoke is exactly compared to Ascendant.
I don’t think this does much to make Palpatine’s return more clear, now we’re adding a bunch of extra clones that look nothing like him, and that apparently have nothing to do with the installations on Exegol? And they weren’t grown on a vat like we see on Exegol, Nevarro or Kamino, but were somehow bred inside random women?? if anything it makes it more weird and confusing.
- TLJ only places a hard emphasis on Rey’s parents. Notice how Kylo only says he was shown who her parents are - not who she is. Beyond that, everything he says must be taken as assumptions he is making. Let’s take a look at Kylo’s following line: “You come from nothing. [Therefore] you’re nothing.” He’s only saying that because any normal person would think that since the people who raised her and gave birth to her are nobodies, she must be one, as well. Regular TROS straight up retcons this because the son of the Emperor is not nobody - end of story. This change is a clever way of bypassing a complete retcon. Rey’s mother gave birth to a clone of Palpatine, but both parents are genetically unrelated to her.
Again this does nothing to avoid undoing the big reveal in TLJ, we’re just dealing with semantics at this point, “well Kylo only kinda assumed Rey was a nobody, he couldn’t have possibly known Rey was a genetic experiment done by Sith cultists plotting to bring back Palpatine’s spirit… but his parents were really nobodies!”, how is that any better than Kylo not knowing some random junk trader he saw was the son of Emperor Palpatine, who chose to become a random junk trader?
- TLJ’s mirror cave sequence is a stupid scene ordinally. This change elevates it into an actual hint to her entire backstory and the trajectory of the trilogy. Rey asks to see her parents. She doesn’t have actual parents, so she sees herself.
Well, like I previously said, this would also work if Rey was a vergence born from the Force, with no real parents.
- There is a reason why Rey’s parents die on Jakku (or are there to begin with). They were looking for Lor San Tekka and his village so that their child could be saved by Luke. This ties back to the very first scene of the entire trilogy.
Like I said before, I don’t think there needs to be an explanation as to why two junk traders were on a junkyard planet, yeah it’s a coincidence Lor San Tekka happened to be hiding there in TFA, but I don’t think such a small plot convenience deserves a big explanation two movies later.
- Leia accepting Rey into her family is more profound. Of course the daughter of Darth Vader would be willing to accept the granddaughter of Sidious. But a clone of Sidious? That’s something else.
This is also not such a sustantial difference for the same reasons as point 1.
- It doesn’t require any further changes beyond this scene and what’s already present in Ascendant v4.
And this is the lesson, this wouldn’t require further changes because it doesn’t fundamentally change much from Rey just being Palpatine’s granddaughter. It doesn’t really solve the issues people have with that reveal, it just adds more lore dump exposition and turns Rey into a weird Sith breeding experiment.