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Why?
You have two whole acts of the story to play with, characters that can fit into standard archetypes that you can develop as you please, a mysterious villain that you can take in any direction you want... Even if we accept that TFA is horrible beyond human comprehension, there is nothing in it that prevents the next episode from being good. This is in stark contrast to TLJ which does fuck everything up for anyone writing the final act.
I mean, I do find TFA near-unwatchably bad, but I'll grant that maybe I have an unusual hatred for it. But I think that if your contention is that TLJ is to blame because it didn't radically swerve course and reinvent the whole ST, then that still seems like a position where a lot of blame would unavoidably fall on TFA for contributing so little to the trilogy that the second film had to reinvent it from scratch.
Considering that TFA was an Abrams contribution, and the universally-despised RoS is also an Abrams contribution - could even a hypothetically perfect TLJ have rescued the trilogy beyond even Abrams' ability to screw up in the third act? I doubt it.
What are you talking about, there was hardly any ST to reinvent. Just tell a normal story and do it well, stop trying to be original and "subversive".
I brought up manga and anime because the Japanese got so good at getting people emotionally invested into characters and showing their development through a series of flashy fights, it's like they got it down to a science. Yeah, yeah, pseudointellectuals will complain about how derivative it all is and has nothing that deep to say, and I will remind them that we're talking about Star Wars. We're aiming for a not-that-deep but fun adventure that everyone can enjoy watching.
The whole problem with TLJ is that it did try to swerve course... onto a wall. With what it did there was no way for part 3 to be anything other than a disaster, which was not the case after TFA.
There was nothing to rescue from post TFA. All the pieces are still on the board minus Han Solo, you can literally do whatever you want. After TLJ not only are Luke and Leia gone, so are the majoroty of the Republic forces, and so is Snoke. Ren was not main villain material and you don't have the time to develop him into one. What the hell were they supposed to do? I low-key hate Abrams, but it's ridiculous to put the blame on him.
I actually think that TLJ itself is extremely derivative and not deep. Critics who said that it was were, in my opinion, engaging in, if not cope, then I think a type of reflexive disagreement with fans. TLJ is mostly a by-the-numbers retread of ESB, in the same way that TFA was a by-the-numbers retread of ANH. You have the desperate flight from the Empire, bickering on a spaceship in an extended escape sequence, an excursion to a corrupt world run by shady businessmen, the protagonist being disappointed and challenged by a cranky old Jedi Master living in exile, a dramatic showdown between protagonist and central villain in which the villain reveals a horrible secret about the protagonist's past, and then the movie's conclusion is the heroes just barely managing to escape and regroup. TLJ isn't a swerve - it's the same damn thing as TFA.
The people hailing it as a clever subversion or deconstruction of Star Wars were mostly people illiterate in the wider Star Wars canon and therefore ignorant of the many superior deconstruction stories already in the franchise.
The "deconstructing Skywalker supremacy " stuff is also only in hindsight. JJ had no idea who Rey's parents were in TFA (Rian could have done anything he wanted there - simply have her be a particularly force sensitive child) and the EU is also full of non-Skywalkers having their moment. Which makes sense, because the core movies are about one set of characters.
We've discussed how other parts of it, namely Holdo's costuming, are both derivative and miss the point of what they're drawing from.
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