I've been thinking a lot about the "TROS makes you feel stupid for caring" thing and... if you actually cared about the ST characters, it really does. Think about what happens to your faves:

Rey: is a Palpatine, has to "earn" Luke's saber, becomes Luke 2.0, loses her soulmate

Finn: is FS, sure, but is reduced to a "REY"-screaming punchline and does FUCK ALL plot-wise

Poe: was a drug smuggler and gives up when there are "too many" enemies

Ben: ...enough said

BUT. If you like the OT? You got pandered to. OH, did you get pandered to.

Leia: CGI'd and reused footage but LOOK A LIGHTSABER! SHE'S A JEDI TOO!

C-3PO: LOOK HE'S PLOT RELEVANT! HE HELPS SAVE THE DAY!

Chewie: HERE'S HIS MEDAL YOU NOSTALGIC FUCKS! ARE YOU HAPPY YET!

Luke: TLJ-SLAMMING REFERENCES! HERE'S MY X-WING! REY WORSHIPS ME NOW FOR NO REASON!

If you cared about the ST characters, their growth, their development, where the story took them, you watched them get shoved to the back in a hamfisted, belated attempt to bring the OT characters to the forefront in order to satisfy salty Internet fans at the story's expense.

Even Rey, who made out by far the best in all of this (it IS her story), only gets to complete her Hero's Journey by falling into lockstep behind Luke's, has her power subsumed within a legacy it DID NOT NEED, ends with suppressed feelings, AGAIN, and has her soul ripped in half.

TROS resorted to pandering to OT fans in the hopes that maybe it would retain a dying segment of the SW fanbase and remain relevant. They sacrificed their own story and characters for that, and simultaneously made the ST and the OT feel hollow and cheap for it.

So, yeah. They made this world and these characters. They made you care about them, their stories, their endpoints and their relationships. The only problem was, in the end, they didn't. Not enough to trust them to stand on their own. Not enough to have faith in their story. /end