I think the Last Jedi communicated its main ideas pretty effectively, I also think at this point the whole conversation about the film and what it did/didn’t do, and the metatextual aspect of discussion the discussions, has so thoroughly overwhelmed it, to where anything about the film is destined to get sucked into a timelocked field of battle that starts around January 2018 and encompasses the rest of that year.
It’s literally like when The Doctor trapped Gallifrey in a 3D painting - that’s The Last Jedi at this point. It’s a very well made movie, easily the closest thing IN the sequel trilogy to a Lucasian story, (and people keep sidestepping/avoiding this aspect - Last Jedi the only story Lucas actually liked and spoke well of - not just in the prequel trilogy, but really across the whole of the output post-sale) and you basically cannot engage with it past a certain point or you get hauled into a timeloop where it never stopped being 2018 and everyone’s basically waiting to indulge the ritual exercise and call-and-response prompts they all know by heart now.
The Acolyte, however - I kinda tried to address/rectify this to some degree in my own edit: My belief is that show ended up getting compromised on the way from pitch to realized show mostly BECAUSE the idea that there was going to be a dark-side focused show that unambiguously shone a light on the Jedi as “not all that good, honestly” got kiboshed. So the show got watered down, and watered down, and the idea of a revenge story against Jedi who overstepped and deserved what they got in return… turned into a weird wishy-washy, mealy-mouth “mystery” whose POV got so muddied it basically became a mild sort of paean to “fence-straddling” as a valid lens to look through.
They HAD a show about intolerant cops covering up their own crime and the victims of that crime getting their payback. And instead they tried to make it weird apologia for the intolerant cops and their system of policing as a whole. Which was weird, because it’s not like this was a real-world institution. The Jedi don’t exist, and huge parts of the fictional universe literally DEPEND on that fake institution collapsing on itself due to corruption/hubris/disconnection from humanity. It made the show severely compromised as dramatic storytelling. Like the people making it were TOLD at some point that what’s important wasn’t even really the story, it was the sanctity of the not-real institution at its center. It wound up being a show without a country, for lack of a better term.
But then again - I think a lot of conversations about these shows/movies would be a lot less fraught in general if the underlying implication WASN’T that Star Wars is more good than bad (it isn’t) and that the stakes for each new entry WEREN’T sky high box-office/ratings/critical triumphs in the top 5% of anything else that’s ever been made, because I honestly think that’s beyond silly at this point. It’s just making it hard to actually enjoy and appreciate these stories for what they are when we’re constantly holding an artificial (and honestly incorrect) standard for minimm quality up as baseline.
It’s okay that about half of all Star Wars is frankly, not good. It’s fine. It’s not a massive insult, and it’s also not a new thing, either. It’s always been like this, and so many of the arguments that break out tend to break out because the people having them refuse to engage with it on anything other than All Or Nothing stakes.