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.
Even if you hypothetically take TLJ out of 2018 and put it in a vacuum with no culture war politics and no preconceived notions about Disney, The Force Awakens, etc. it’s not good. It’s technically nice and has some neat cinematography and visuals, and Mark Hamill and Adam Driver put in some decent performances, but that’s about all. Certain segments like Canto Bight are downright ugly. Subplots go nowhere. Character actions don’t make sense or seem designed to be unsatisfying (I don’t just mean Luke.) Hypothetically if it wasn’t a Star Wars movie I don’t know how good it would be considered, but it also depends a lot on the Star Wars branding to give weight to what happens in it (Yoda showing up for example.) I don’t want to re-litigate all of this right now though. You’ve heard it all before.
I haven’t watched The Acolyte but based on everything I’ve heard about it, the message was picked up by the audience just fine and it wasn’t really messed with at all. The Jedi weren’t meant to be complete bad guys, just “bad guys to the bad guys” and antagonists, as well as authority figures, with the understanding that Star Wars is about fighting authority figures. The Media Literate people flexed their Media Literacy and figured it out pretty easily.
I think the issue people have with more than half of Star Wars not being good is that it could have been left alone and stayed good. Even if you don’t like Return of the Jedi like a lot of people, 2/3 great movies is an extremely good rate, and for most people it’s 2.5/3 or 3/3. Then if you weren’t interested in EU books or video games or comics, you just didn’t bother, and it was out of sight, out of mind. Now we get major movies and TV shows with budgets in the high millions pushed in our faces regularly as the biggest thing on the planet, overpriced theme parks, and constant churn that you’re expected to keep up with. Yes, that’s “okay”. It’s not illegal or anything. It’s not going to kill anyone. You can just walk away. But it makes sense to think fondly of a simpler time when it was 2/3, 2.5/3, 3/3, plus maybe bonus extras, vs. 1753/5000 or whatever.