I’m not really sure what is supposedly innately wrong with Galaxy’s Edge besides the lack of kinetic energy — its immersion is top notch and it has a great sense of exploration (and actually feels sizable, unlike most of Epic’s lands).
But it’s not lost on me that most modern theme park critique is rating a land on the Kinetic Energy Scale, lol.
To me, GE feels more like a backlot with a couple of attractions on one side than a themed land.
There's lots of buildings and static stuff taking up space but there's nothing going on with most of it. There's really nothing to do but walk past most of what's there. I feel like they could have saved at least 1/3 of that space for something else, even if it meant not being able to tout it as the largest expansion in their history.
The comparisons of GE and Berk seem silly to me because out of all the lands in Epic, that is the one meant least to compete with something like GE, which itself was meant to compete with Potter. For a similarly intended audience, the easiest comparison seems to be TSL. (funny enough,
both have coasters with bad views, too)
I think the only takeaway is why couldn't Disney do with droids what Universal did with dragons? The droids even have advantages: Much easier to build and maintain with incredibly basic articulation and internal access points for maintenance that don't even need to be hidden, easier to use weatherproof and weather resistant materials on and the ability to use blinking lights as a cheap way to make them look real. A
$10 off-the-shelf sensor could have been used to make a few of them stare guests down without having to expect much more out of them since they're only intended to be robots to begin with. Best of all, when they break and only partially function, they still look and act like real droids so it's not immersion breaking the way a dragon with a weird lazy eye or a mouth that doesn't open would be.
Instead, they've opted for a small number of cute little expensive and over-engineered wonders that have to be puppeteered, run on batteries and will have limited interaction time with guests. Like Muppet Mobile Lab -
really cool but something many park guests will never end up experiencing outside of youtube.