In case anyone could be prompted to come up with genius ideas, the weak point in my proposal is still Finn’s change of heart and return to Maz’s castle. As it stands, minus FX work, he sees the TIEs approaching, and then we next see him in the basement. Missing is some sort of telegraphing that he wants to head back.
It’s been ages since I posted here, but I felt like I had to comment on your ideas.
I think that it could indeed work to keep the shots where Finn returns to the castle by doing the following: Keep the scenes with Finn where they are and just cut out the destruction of Hosnian Prime, but instead of having the TIEs having arrived already, we only see them in the distance.
It’d go like this: Rey runs away from the castle. Then instead of Hux’ speech and the destruction of Hosnian Prime we see Finn looking up and he spots the TIEs in the distance. It cuts directly to Han and the other visitors of Maz’ castle who are wondering what’s coming towards them. Finn arrives and tells Han that it’s the first order before asking about Rey and we continue with the movie just like in the original version.
Changing Finns text would require some audio work of course but I think that this could work better than having the TIEs already at the castle when Finn turns around.