..
What you^ first argued.
Now you've moved your goal post.
Point is they've always been portrayed as competent when necessary to seem a threat, and incompetent when the heroes need to win, or get away.
This didn't start with just ROTJ, or something disney only does.
Your cherry picking and attributing to troopers "competent and successful" is laughable, when you then accuse Kebron of doing exactly what you did.
You're getting your fruits all mixed up. And omg, I'm
accusing Kebron?
Kebron was the one who introduced sarcasm and poseur faux-superiority. This is a discussion about something important. I care about SW, and something's gone wrong. So you discuss - not do the meme/bub-bye bs.
What I'm saying is that there are
very few examples of ineffective imperial forces in the OT - despite your cherry-picked examples, they are overwhelmingly effective, frightening, and
critically (for stakes, tension and the story) seem they will win against the heroes.
That is not the case in the D+ series. If in the OT, imperial forces are 80-90% effective and 10-20% not, the D+ is reversed. The D+ Benny Hill Brigade shows up over and over and over, across multiple series (yes, soon to be Andor/Ahsoka too) - and it's a HUGE problem.
But this is where cherry picking, confusion and conflation comes in.
Yes, (most of the time) heroes obviously can't be killed. Yes, obviously all stories have the hero with the machine gun killing many soldiers while those soldiers all somehow miss ("Commando," anyone?). This is narrative conceit. Obviously, in these moments, you run the risk of making those soldiers look like idiots. But you balance this out with context: by showing those soldiers otherwise as not just very competent but
certain to win.
Overwhelmingly, we need to see their victories, their power, their prowess - make us feel
it's impossible to defeat them.
So in this regard, stories need to do two things to work: first, they need to show heroes as competent, and second, they need to show the adversaries as not just more competent, but good enough to
beat the heroes (even though we all know that the heroes will triumph - so yes, it's a conceit.)
It's a balance, because you sometimes need to show things like the "Commando" example above (even if you want to make those moments as realistic as possible using staging and injuries/deaths on the good guy side, and not going the "Commando" route like the totally comedy of the Jabiim stormie assault.)
But if you ONLY show the first thing, and not the second thing, you lose stakes, tension and more: it makes the heroes look much less heroic, and it robs stories of their wider real-world relevance. Because all around the world there are forces that the Imperials are symbolic of, and they are brutal, very competent and they are winning. They don't line up to get slapped dead like D+ stormies do.
