The lack of planning is honestly the cancer that triggered the symptoms of the ST's failures. The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker are both movies that color outside the lines of what would "usually" be in that respective episode. Everything on Crait is kind of Rian's Episode IX while everything in the first half of Episode IX is kind of JJ's Episode VIII.
By the end of The Last Jedi, Rey being a nobody was already "solved." That pain point was healed; she has already been accepted into a surrogate family. Conventionally, that would be her arc in Episode IX "dealing" with the revelation of being a nobody. I'm not necessarily criticizing Rian for doing this. I mostly love his movie! But it does limit the avenues the writers of Episode IX can take, and it was perhaps a little reckless of Rian Johnson to write what would ordinarily be a IX arc into VIII without knowing quite what it's setting up. He was, to an extent, flying blind. Terrio and JJ recently said they created Palpatine to give Rey a "present-tense" problem. I don't blame them at all for this; they needed to find a motivating factor from whole cloth, as Rian took all those pieces from the board.
To an extent, Rian was flying blind when writing The Last Jedi and that's not his fault, its Disney's. But, to another extent, it was Rian's responsibility to set up Episode IX, and he handed that baton off in a clumsy way. Likewise, it's probably JJ's fault he made a movie that goes against a lot of what The Last Jedi was doing, even if some of it may have been the only place he knew where to take it given how The Last Jedi ended. In short, it's a mess, each of them clumsily reacting to one another with different voices and visions.
PS, I genuinely liked TROS on second viewing. I agree with Armand on his previous post. It is a disastrously flawed movie, but if you disliked it the first time, give it another shot.
-Vader
