I see it as a small, self-contained story. It's job is primarily to put the old guard to rest while paving the way for the new characters to lead the franchise from here on out. Even Leia, though she survives, gives way at the end for Poe to take the lead.
As for Praise for Johnson fading, it will be interesting see how opinions on this film and his work evolves over time.
When I was a kid, the school had this public speaking contest every year, where every kid had to write and deliver a 5 or 10 minute speech about whatever they wanted. So some kids would research some topic they were passionate about, dig up lots of facts and in some cases deliver them charismatically, and sometimes make the whole class or school interested in the topic. Sharks, baseball, whatever. There would be maybe four rounds to the whole thing. First in your class, to get a top ten, then again to get a top three, then top three from every class, and then a final five in front of the whole school or something like that. Maybe three rounds.
Anyway, one year we had a kid write a speech about "how hard it is to come up with a topic for this speech contest." And at first it sounds like, wow, what an unexpected and fresh idea. But all he did was ramble for five or ten minutes about how he watched TV and couldn't think of anything, and then he went to bed and couldn't think of anything, and then he had breakfast and couldn't think of anything, he went to the library and flipped through books and nothing seemed like the right topic, and then he asked the teacher for ideas and none of them worked, and then he went to the movies and couldn't think of anything, and then he rode his bike around and couldn't think of anything...
And in the first round of the contest, everybody laughed for the first minute or two at the topic, and liked the rest well enough. And he got through to the next round, and the second time we heard it it was like, yeah kinda funny. And it kept losing steam as it got from round to round and people had heard it before, and they realized that he'd really written nothing of substance and just chickened out of the assignment and listed a bunch of dumb ass things he did while not thinking of a topic.
But it was kind of fresh and unexpected, so he ended up making it to the final round that year.
And then the next year, ten fucking kids wrote a speech about how hard it was to write their own speech.
This is kind of what I'm talking about when I reference the danger of rewarding Rian Johnson here.
And to be honest, I think what he did was even worse in some ways. Some of the mocking of the fans in his own movie is kind of like standing up in front of the class and delivering a speech about "why our teacher Mr. Wilson is a f****t." You can research it well and make perfect, brilliant arguments, but you still might get a zero.
