Regarding the hand guard on the new Lightsaber:

It actually makes a TON of sense. Having practiced European fencing in college and Japanese kendo for the last eight years, I can tell you from practical experience that having a hand guard at the base of your blade is absolutely imperative to prevent your enemy from just sliding his sword down your blade and cutting your hand off. (It's one of the biggest complaints I have about traditional lightsabers but they're so cool I was always willing to give it a pass / that and there ARE techniques I've learned in Japanese sword fighting where you can survive without a hand guard, you just have to be extremely good and very cautious and very very very aggressive).

THE PROBLEM with the specific design we see here is that there is an individual emitter head for each laser beam that could easily be cut off thus rendering the hand guard a mood point. A better design would have been to have one emitter just like a classic Lightsaber but then have a prism or something that splits the blade in three ways but doesn't leave a gap of any kind between the main blade laser and the little crossing lasers.