Maybe you are confusing me with someone who hated TFA. I did not. It was a fun film with a lot of parts to like. Unfortunately, it was also a very uneven film with a lot to criticize. I genuinely feel sorry for anyone who thinks this movie approached anything close to the quality of Star Wars or Empire. Most people I’ve seen would rank it somewhere around Jedi, which is probably more fair. I like Jedi more just because of the Luke/Vader/Emperor scenes that bring a close to the previous two stories, but to each their own.
The flaws, the coincidences, the crappy moments (Han’s Freighter, Finn whooping at Poe’s X-Wing mid battle, etc) are all genuinely bad moments, I’m with you dude, I agree. I’d sooner cut them.
I also agree, wholeheartedly, that TFA is nowhere near as good as ANH and ESB. I won’t even put it in the same league as ROTJ because I’ve watched ROTJ a million times over the course of 30 years and for all it’s ewoks and yub nub and stupid rescue plans that don’t make sense, it has some awesome moments (eg Vader’s redemption which you pointed out) and I’ve only seen TFA twice. It doesn’t come close to the feelings I have about the sacred Original Trilogy.
But as a fourth movie, made decades after the originals, I think TFA is very good. It’s certainly reignited my interest in Star Wars (I’m back on OT.com after a 5 year break so it must have done something right) and pushed all the right buttons (for me) as I sat in the cinema.