After trying out Rogue One after Andor, I’ve been doing the original trilogy next. As I suspected, it resonates a lot more with Star Wars 1977/A New Hope than ESB or ROTJ. ANH starts with Leia as a senator, the Imperials talking about how the Emperor dissolved the senate, Luke living as an average person, and of course the Yavin base and the rebels taking on the Death Star. After that though, the rebels are the background for the main characters. Andor barely deals at all with the rebel pilots and ground troops, and other than the main characters, they’re the main stars of all the battles in the original trilogy.
Andor isn’t “better” than the movies, it’s a completely different tone and genre so you can’t really compare them. Han Solo wouldn’t exist in Andor, and neither would Obi-Wan, Yoda, Jabba, or Boba Fett. Vader and the Emperor were deliberately excluded. You could make a case for a toned down, less adventurous version of Luke, Leia, Tarkin, R2D2, and maybe C3PO or Chewbacca. No classic alien monsters like the dianoga, the space slug, or the rancor. Andor is cool but by comparison it’s dreary and a little bit lifeless. That fits for its genre but the idea that it’s somehow better than everything else in Star Wars is contemptuous. It’s just different.
This also goes for the people sneering at the awards ceremony for Luke and Han destroying the Death Star. Andor doesn’t change anything. Okay, they joined the rebellion like a day ago. So what? Everyone would jump at the chance to celebrate the people who finished the mission after so much sacrifice. Luke’s aunt and uncle, the people who raised him, got turned into charred skeletons and his home was burned down. Leia was tortured and had her planet (including her entire family) destroyed in front of her. Han gave up dealing with a bounty on his head to risk everything and join the rebellion, and he later got tortured and frozen into a block of carbon for his trouble. If there was any mission in Andor that was dangerous and risky, that probably goes double for going into the belly of the beast in the Death Star itself and making it out alive. Yes Vader let them escape so they could go back to the rebel base - there’s nothing saying he had to let anyone other than Leia do that. Luke, Han, and Chewie could have been killed or worse. Setting aside blowing up the Death Star by itself, they’ve got their rebel bona fides even if they got them relatively quickly.
Meanwhile Andor-version Mon Mothma gets to be head of state because she was born rich, went to a lot of parties, and reluctantly let her daughter marry a boy she wanted to marry. Let’s give some champions some medals, I think it’ll be okay.
I wouldn’t say Rogue One is a good transition point either because it has its own problems, but that’s another story.