When Mark Hamill dislikes what was done to Luke then what was done was wrong. The whole bitter hermit approah was stupid and is Luke repeating the mistakes of his mentors.

TLJ undermined a ton of character development for the sake of subverting everything including what little internal consistency existed in the Star Wars universe.

Johnson laid down plot threads

That he severed moments later. Yes. That was the biggest issue with his flick, in how he sabotaged any new interesting characters and material at the onset, providing with a rather good ending, but leaving with nothing appealing to follow.

The first 6 movies pretty conclusively covered the failure of the jedi order and their flaws. TLJ is a lazy retread of this beaten to death point. We did get the whole rich people sold things to both sides point, but it's purely surface level and doesn't get explored to any degree.

It left the resistance at a ship full of people and the big bad being kylo who already got beat by Rey in 7 and outsmarted by Luke in 8. He somehow has to redeem himself in 9 while allowing the rest of the bad guys to remain bad, because if he's actually the leader he can just stop everything.

Luke's mentors were hermits because they were in hiding. It makes no sense for Luke to hide from a galaxy, there wasn't an empire actively hunting him. Him being in hiding was JJ's fault, but the reason was entirely left to Johnson and he fumbled it.

The hermit thing was only something his mentors did because they were in hiding from the ruling power. Once RoTJ finishes, the empire can no longer force jedi into hiding.

I appreciate that he managed to make both Star Trek and Star Wars fans very angry. That took serious skill.

Disney have to bring in shows that take place prior to the sequels because their only attempt at anything extraneous to the movies within the “sequel era” was Resistance which went over poorly.

When it comes to the sequels, it’s that Spider-Man meme of Abrams and Johnson pointing at one another over who ruined what more. Abrams started a very basic, formulaic trilogy that had very clearly intended plot points; Rey was going to be the hidden of child/grandchild of Luke, Kenobi, Qui-Gon, whomever, Finn was going to be this Trooper-turned-Jedi character we’d never seen before, and Poe was going to follow a Han Solo archetype. Rian decides that this is banal (it was) and throws out everything that was loosely started in TFA to “subvert expectations”, which would have been fine if Rian had started the trilogy.

Asinine as the rehashed plot of TFA was, Rian shouldn’t have taken the project if he had no intentions of following through on those loose plot points. Instead, TLJ has no connection to TFA and is a horrible second entry point in a trilogy. I would have welcomed the idea of Rey being a complete nobody and that the strongest Force-user is just a random person, not connected to the Skywalkers, but TFA didn’t allow for that. TFA shoe-horned this trilogy into unoriginal, simplistic storytelling, and you can’t suddenly throw out everything that was setup and offer nothing in its place.

TFA set us up with a ton of questions to be answered: what was Rey’s connection to the Skywalkers, how will Finn become a Jedi, what did Luke create following RotJ and why did he abandon it, who/what is Snoke, how did this First Order come to be and gain power after the end of RotJ… TFA opens the door, with the intention of the second act answering all these questions, and the third act showing good prevailing over evil once again. TLJ, however, doesn’t bother to answer any of the questions or expand any of the new characters presented to us. Then in comes TRoS like a wrecking ball, trying to make connections back to TFA and failing hard as it reverts everything that TLJ reverted.

In short, Disney figured they’d bought the golden goose and all they had to do was just sit in on the nest to rake in the billions, but forgot you need to actually feed and nurture the damn thing. They gave two hack directors no boundaries and then stood with Shocked Pikachu face when they produced a hacked up story.

What Disney need to do is just claim that the “end” of the Skywalker saga is part of Legends, recast Luke, Leia, and Han and give us something that resembles Heir to the Empire, or create something entirely original, so that we have an actual sequel to the OT.

There was one man who carried the sequels hard. One man that no matter what shit the sequels threw at him he turned to gold. Yet here you are implying he couldn't have been the central antagonist for the last movie?!

Also so what Luke died in some epic space wizardry?! Force ghosts meant he could have played just as big a part in the final act. That's not the detriment you claim it to be.

You mean the wookies spelled backwards? Because they are tiny?

They might be a factor...

The subtext, not the subplot itself.

Its just one of those things thats not gonna translate well with a 2 hour movie. Like in the videogames, being grey works because the sark/light side indicator is a slider and YOU control your actions. In the supposed lore of the movies, the dark side is like an addiction and even using it once can send a jedi spiraling. So it just doesn't translate well. Its cool in the games to shoot lightning and then turn around and heal someone. In the movies, it just doesn't mash well with what is established.

Those are good questions... for another time