I'll never, ever understand people disliking Luke's arc in Last Jedi; frankly, it's the only part of the movie that really clicked for me. Honestly, the best thing Johnson did was take all the "surprise boxes" Abrams left after episode 7, all those things they clearly had no thought-out plans for whatsoever (e.g. who is Snoke, who are Rey's parents, blah blah blah), and smash them in favor of asking "Is this really all Star Wars can be? Light side vs. Dark side and Rebels vs. Empire, on repeat forever? Can't we do something different? Can't we tell different stories?" And heck, If Last Jedi had ended at the end of its second act, with Rey being offered to join Ben working as a cliffhanger, I'd have actually liked it as a film.
Instead, the third act happened, and it pretty much felt like corporate swooped in and said "Uh, no, it will always be Light vs. Dark and Rebels vs. Empire, so make sure the ending reassures the audience of that."
I remember going into Force Awakens and being really interested in what the galaxy would look like under a New Republic, with all its included challenges and quirks, and quickly realizing "oh no, we're just going back to the original trilogy status quo, aren't we?" Last Jedi got my hopes up that they recognized that couldn't be the way going forward, only to chicken out at the last minute. Couldn't have cared less about episode 9 at that point.
...and c'mon, folks, the prequels were terrible. They had some good ideas behind them, but they were executed horrendously, and I say that as someone who was only in middle school when episode 1 came out.
