In isolation TLJ was a perfectly good movie, as a followup to TFA it was incomplete but had potential which is just fine for a part 2 of 3. The biggest mistake made in the Disney trilogy was reading their own reviews. Show business has 1 rule, don't read the reviews, they broke it. They responded to a bunch of nonsensical complaints from random people on the internet and produced the steaming pile of garbage that was TRoS, which was only reviled by RotS in it's horrendousness but still managed to be somehow worse. Where RotS it was clearly a bad movie just because the writers and actors had complete checked out realizing that they weren't repeating the critical claim of the originals, TRoS actually managed to be so bad that it made the prior two movies worse just by association.
But beyond that, I agree if you are trying to tell a 3 episode contained story over the course of 4 years, then at the very least have an outline for where all of your foreshadowing is going. If you are going to pose the mystery of who Reys family is to the audience, you'd better not have 4 factions in your production team fighting for four different answers, there needs to be a settled direction or there needs to not be mystery/foreshadowing. If you're going to have your big villain stand at the edge of redemption and turn his back, than just don't go straight back the redemption arc in the next instalment.
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