Bringing back Palpatine, and then just saying ‘somehow Palpatine returned’, is as dumb as John Cleese saying (in Monty Python’s Holy Grail) “she turned me into a newt…(awkward pause)…but I got better”.

I’ve bored folks with this before but I’ll say it again - the villain in the sequels should have been Mon Mothma.

She would be presented as a shadowy figure like Sidious in the prequels, the difference being she would actually be anonymous to the viewer. She would appear throughout the series as ‘herself’ in a fan-service kind of way, but there would also be red herrings (ie Holdo) to draw suspicion away from her true identity. And it is she who would be reconstituting the Empire in secret, as well as being a confidant to the son of her ‘friends’ Han and Leia and thus drawing him into her plot to honour the glorious ambitions of his grandfather Lord Darth Vader.

In the end it would be revealed that she had been promised a seat of power at the side of Palpatine in RoTJ. She had killed the Bothan spies herself and had delivered the false information to Akbar and co. And of course when the Rebels defeated the Empire, she began to plan her revenge.

This would make the sequels entirely valid. It leaves the Endor victory intact, it honours the prequels’ ‘balance of the Force’ crap, it gives a good reason for a reconstituted Empire, and it leaves Palpatine in the grave where he belongs. It justifies the conversion of Ben Solo and, best of all, makes the rebel briefing room scene in RoTJ really dark and nuanced in hindsight. We get our nostalgia fix without harming the OT (and the PT) whatsoever.

P.S. the construction of this idea would have predated Rogue One and Andor…