I was down with that whole scene except for that one part. When I saw it the first time I just assumed they were in that same system, but when I learned it was lightyears away I was annoyed. It made it seem tacked-on just because they couldn’t be arsed to come up with a way to have Han and Friends learn about it in a way that would make us care (which we wouldn’t have anyway because why does the Hosnian system even matter in the movie because they cut out the one scene that explained it).
We cared about Alderaan because that’s where Leia was from and because it was the focal point of the first act of the movie. They gotta go to Alderaan, that’s where the answers are, that’s where Leia is from, that’s where her father is and when they get Ben there it’ll all be good, and then things fall completely apart and it’s destroyed despite being a peaceful, innocent planet (the symbol of good against the evil Death Star), cementing the Empire as unquestionably evil and then the death of Ben on top of that means that all but one thing our heroes set out to do have failed and they’re forced to improvise to survive. Alderaan is an objective and a catalyst.
In The Force Awakens a system we’ve never heard about is blown up by a superweapon we’ve never seen until just moments before for reasons that aren’t very well-explained.
Now, if Han and friends were trying to get to the Resistance’s leaders on Hosnian Prime to warn them about the Starkiller Base that they stumbled across earlier somehow (which gives the First Order a better reason to blow up the system), and the Hosnian system is destroyed on the way there, which they learn about from Maz or something and everyone assumes the Resistance was on the planet when it blew, then we have real gravity and despair when the First Order shows up and Rey is captured, and then actual hope and happy surprise when Leia shows up not long after to take the survivors to the actual Resistance base.
I’m just spitballing and since the whole movie is basically the same plot as the OT anyway it’s not far out of line.