Gaffer Tape said:
One, could Ben's death have benefitted from more danger?
I'm not sure, Gaffer. I like the way it goes down currently, not sure if him getting beat down makes Vader more "evil", just makes him seem more powerful. And I like the idea of an old man still being powerful enough to have to give up in order to be beaten by his apprentice.
Two, did the presence of stormtroopers in that situation increase the level of danger?
I've always thought of them more as a peanut gallery in that particular sequence. They just want to see a good old fashioned lightsaber fight. :-D
Three, if so, have stormtroopers (and their counterparts) become exponentially more pathetic as time goes on?
Definitely. Even in the same movie, we go from:
them slaughtering Rebels
being told how precise they are
hiding from them
being cornered by them
to
chasing them
locking doors on them that they can't figure out how to open (twice!)
standing in plain view in front of several of them
This doesn't include the rest of the films or the battle droids (oh, the battle droids).
Four, what happened to stealth?
Admittedly, the Rebels were trying to sneak around Endor, but Han had to go ruin it by wanting to take the first two they saw out directly.
Five, how did the scouts in ROTJ not realize that many of their own men went missing at the same time their speeder bike began to randomly explode in the forest, and did they not manage to put two and two together (maybe slightly justified in that it was a trap all along)?
Probably the knowing its a trap part as they had to keep the Rebels rooting around long enough to bring the fleet in (assuming the Rebels had to send a signal to the fleet, which they didn't). My favorite part is this is "an entire legion of [the] best troops". How do they figure that out? Its comprised of troopers that survived at least one battle somehow?