What’s so ironic is that there is a lot of evidence that the primary reason Luke Skywalker had such limited percentage of screen-time in the Sequels, compared to say, the legacy characters in Cobra Kai, is because the screenwriters initially feared that the legacy characters would absolutely overshadow all the new characters (at least in the case of Luke). The screenwriters (presumably including Lawrence Kasdan himself?) seemed to just outright throw up their hands and admit they simply weren’t skilled enough as screen-writers to write a story that included both legacy and new characters side-by-side without the legacy characters completely overshadowing the new ones.
When I first saw TFA in the theater, I enjoyed very much the chemistry between Finn and Poe and also between Finn and Rey. The new characters and actors in the Sequels weren’t bad at all. Finn especially was a novel and interesting character concept. The problem was ENTIRELY 100% in the screen-writing.
Anyway, as another counter-factual to the Sequel Trilogy (but a VERY controversial one), I’d offer Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Now hear me out on this for a second. I know the movie mostly sucks. But the way the movie introduced a new character (Indy’s son Mutt) to inherit the legacy of Indiana Jones was arguably handled correctly. They put Indy in an absentee father role - similar to Sean Connery in The Last Crusade - and showed how Indy and Mutt had a lot to learn from each other. The movie did a good job depicting Mutt’s unfolding relationship with Indy, who had just as much screen-time (or more) as Mutt. Of course, the movie turned out to suck anyway, mostly for plot-related reasons, but the handling of a new character introduced to inherit the legacy of a beloved aging character was arguably done correctly and skillfully, or at least was on the right track conceptually.
Crystal Skull could have served as the archetypal example of “new character replacing beloved aging legacy character” done more or less competently - and also serve as a much closer analogy than any Netflix series for an illustrative comparison with the Star Wars Sequels - if only the rest of the movie wasn’t ruined by such a lackluster and poorly conceived plot.
Anyway, say what will you will about George Lucas - and certainly, I doubt his weird “Midichlorian Micro-adventure” Sequel Trilogy would have been particularly good - but I’m convinced that Lucas at the very least would have handled the interplay between legacy characters and new characters a lot better than Disney did. Disney arguably also had ulterior motivation to promote the new characters at the expense of legacy ones, because Disney had already invested billions into theme parks, toys and promotional materials based around Sequel Trilogy locations and characters, gambling that a new Sequel Trilogy fan-base would soon grow to eclipse the aging Gen-X/Millennial fan-base of the Original Trilogy. This business decision still seems clinically insane to me, but then again I’m not a CEO so what do I know? But after paying 4 billion USD for Star Wars, why the hell would you risk alienating the demographic in your fan base with the most disposable income to buy Star Wars shit? I guess they assumed TFA’s “retro” aesthetic would be sufficient to keep the older fans - and it was, for a time. To be fair, George Lucas took a similar risk when marketing the Prequels to a new generation, but his gamble actually paid off financially, and the Prequel characters arguably weren’t really “inheriting” the legacy of any OT characters in the same way. George Lucas also probably has much better business instincts than Bob Iger or Kathleen Kennedy, and probably could have easily explained to them that a character like “Jake Skywalker” is not likely to sell too many action figures, and that Star Wars’ historical profitability had just as much to do with new iconic starship designs and nerdy world-building materials driving merchandise sales for decades after the release of the films as it did with box-office revenue and VHS/DVD purchases.