They went about it the way a big money guzzling corp would and let the audience feedback and ticket sales affect and determine the creative decisions. And if the reddit chatter is true, Abrams had a bunch of his scenes from the final film chopped right out of it by the people upstairs as they tried to get it down to the most audience-friendly version possible for their target audience, rather than let the man put out his full vision in all its glory and not meddle in it.
I liked a lot of things about Episode 9 still, but admittedly it did play it very safe in many ways and with a tried and true formula that was quite familiar. Ultimately though, I think it's just that a trilogy under the titles of episode VII, VIII, and IX really deserved cohesiveness and continuity between episodes that stayed true to a larger vision across the three installments, rather than the mixed-bag Frankenstein it ended up being. There was a lot of potential story-wise that was left unexploited because of the lack of vision and tug of war behind the camera.
One can only hope they learn something from it.
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