Thanks for this. I agree. I think people often overlook that storytelling is as much a craft as it is an art. While it's true that aesthetics are subjective, those same aesthetics have certain requirements that must be fulfilled, in order to accomplish something in the real world: like communication.
People often forget that the goal of storytelling is to express ideas. While the joy that someone gets from a certain expression of ideas differs from one individual to the next, the ability to communicate those ideas effectively requires all kinds of obstacles and boundaries, where you either succeed, or fail in attempting it.
There are academics who argue that we never actually communicate ideas, but instead, project meaning onto the text itself. Post Modernist philosophers would argue that meaning is also subjective; that you bring yourself to the book, rather than learn from it. I don't agree with this perspective, but when I studied literature in university, there were many attempts to convince me of this perspective. There was a conscious effort to undermine realism, objectivity or evade bias. We were taught that bias is inevitable, and that you can never know the intentions of the author, even when they state them explicitly. Language deceives you. Can you imagine paying tuition to learn this nonsense?!
In many ways, I think Post Modernism is responsible for a lot of unintelligible narratives in modern fiction, including The Last Jedi. Film schools probably throw Derrida at everyone, in hopes of creating something avant-garde, when in reality it makes for convoluted fiction that doesn't work. You can like it in a vacuum, but you'll never learn anything about the world, from it.
I'll still buy toys from the OT, because Lucas tapped into the theories of Joseph Campbell regarding archetypes that coincided with the evolution of our species. There are certain aspects to mythology that have always encapsulated what we are as people, because they reflect how we experience the world. The OT was about the rights of passage one had to endure, to become an adult. There was a linear structure involving cause and effect, where you felt something for the characters because you were dragged through their tribulations in attempting to get what they wanted, watching them change in the process. The new trilogy fails, in this regard.
