I always felt as though the Leia scene was a nice Easter egg, but a little too in your face- plotwise.
The battle over Scariff should’ve been (in addition to destroying the shield) a distraction. While the battle keeps the Empire distracted, Leia’s ship is sitting further out in system waiting for the transmission. Nobody realizes they were there until Vader storms the last ship, and the Empire realizes they got duped. Wouldn’t even need the cameo, just a shot of Leia’s ship off in the distance jumping to light speed. Hmm, getting some desire to start a fan edit of this movie.
Anyways, I think there’s some really good potential to get a near perfect deepfake if you can find enough decent source photos. Even the one that was mentioned earlier I would call a passable attempt. It’s a pretty straight forward shot which always makes things easier.
EDIT: Just read through some earlier posts and realized NeverarGreat had the same idea. Glad to see I’m not the only one who thinks the plans should’ve actually been transmitted to her ship.
To fix it would be easy, just delete those scenes. No cringe and better continuity.
It would be cool if some fanedit showed the Rebel soldiers frantically transmitting the plans to the Tantive IV, floating somewhere at the edge of the Scarif system. It would still use the Leia CG, but would make for much better continuity.