The scene itself was fine, and necessary. But setting the ship down that far away from Galen's homestead did nothing but stretch out the scene to escalate the dramatic tension - which it didn't for me, because it was so clearly done for no other purpose. That's what I mean when I called it cheesy.
As for the characters, there was plenty of room for more interesting exposition - but the exposition we got was threadbare. And each character was introduced with, "Hi, I'm so-and-so and I do such-and-such" and then, with the exception of Cassian (and of course Galen and Jyn)... nothin'. The difference between this narrative and Aliens or Predator is that in those movies, the side characters were clearly fodder for a malevolent antagonist, and when they died we didn't really need to care about them so much other than what they said about how bad the alien or predator was. The chemistry between all the players in Rogue One made up for it to a large part though, the performances were great - when they died we cared because of their clear friendships and respect. But that came through the casting and performances rather than the writing.
That third act though might be my most favourite of all the Star Wars set-pieces - it's hard to beat the first-time impact that the initial Death Star assault had on me as a kid, but this is right up there.
