They did introduce new characters and there was no way they were making a sequel trilogy that omitted all the characters from the OT. Why even bother making an episode VII if it isn’t going to have any relation to the previous installments?

I don’t see how the story makes the OT unimportant. Did you think that there weren’t ever going to be any more bad guys in the universe after the Emperor died? Wasn’t the idea of some sort of an Imperial Remnant already thought of in the EU anyways? It seemed logical to me then and still does in TFA.