Johnson was correct. We didn't "need" any additional info on Snoke. He knew he was evil, had powers, and had minions. The end.
Movies are allowed to simply drop a threat into the protagonists' laps without having to spell out every ounce of backstory on who the bad guys are. Apparently the Star Wars prequels and films like Prometheus and AVP have robbed some movie goers of having any ability to use their imaginations, fill in blanks, or just accept a threat at face value.
I can easily say this because many of the best films ever made had even less backstory than what we've gotten in TFA/TLJ.
In ANH Obi-Wan described the Force to Luke and that Vader used to be his pupil before he turned but said *nothing* of the Emperor. Nor did ESB. And then in ROTJ when the Emperor finally made his full appearance we didn't learn so much as his *name.* He was just "Evil ******* in Black Who Wants to Kill the Heroes." The end.
In TLJ Snoke = The Emperor and Kylo = Vader. And do you know what? We've been given much more info on Kylo than we ever got on Vader in the OT. We never knew why Vader turned, what lead to him wearing the suit, any of that. But with Kylo we've gotten as much info in two films as we got on Vader in *six.* So the sequels aren't lacking on backstory exposition.
in 1979 nobody knew why the Space Jockey was on LV-426 or what the purpose of the eggs were. They simply provided an unexplained threat that the protagonists had to deal with. *Same with ALIENS.* After two films we still knew nothing about the xenomorphs origins. In the first Predator film all we knew about the Predator was that he was mean, bristling with weapons, and liked to hunt "worthy" prey. The end. We didn't know what system they came from, any other details about their visits (other than him showing up when it got "very very hot"), hell we didn't even know what he did on Earth when he *wasn't* hunting. Did he have a lair in the jungle? Did the Predators take turns or was it always the same one, etc. Then crappy movies like AVP came along and filled in a lot of those details. But the details never needed to be spelled out.
Sometimes films can just have villains that show up and "do what they do." Snoke's history was absolutely not important to Rey's story, no more important than the Emperor's was to Luke's. Sometimes people need to step back from being obsessive fans who pour over every ounce of irrelevant minutiae and just let these stories just function with the same rules as any other film.
