Ryan-SWI said:
A story about Luke building the new temple and training Kylo would have at least been more interesting than a string of interchangeable events we’ve seen before tied together by “coincidences”.

A story about Luke training a bunch of Jedi’s (specifically the offspring of Leia and Han) would have been made a long loooong ass time ago. You can’t really blame TFA for a 30 year gap; blame Lucas.

everything else is exactly the same or a very slight variation of what’s come before.

I think it’s how you look at it…if you condense the film into meme form then yes but if you look at it with detail then a myriad of difference become apparent whether minute or substantial.

but I can’t look past how obvious a safe-player it was.

After the PT we needed safe. Now that most people are on board they can do bold things and from what I’ve heard Rian is doing something kind of weird with VIII.

Ryan-SWI said:
TFA just felt like Disney saying “see, we hate the prequels too, we’ll prove it by showing you cool X-Wings and Stormtroopers again!” and putting their quest to ‘regain trust’ over making an actual piece of art; basically it felt like a money maker and nothing more.

I find that ironic due to the PT (AOTC especially) being one giant toy commercial.