Now for something actually important

I just realized that I haven't even written anything about The Last Jedi, I have been so busy with all kinds of serious grown up stuff that I neglected something really important: YODA.  Sorry, before you read any further, if you haven't seen the movie (SPOILER ALERT), I'm going to talk about stuff that happens in the movie that will really be better if you just experience first hand.
So last things first, I understand why some people are upset with this movie. There has been the usual interweb backlash against this thing or that thing and I agree there are some things about the movie that could have been done better, or more specifically, not done at all.  BIG THING that should not have been done: Princess Leia force gliding her way through the icy vacuum of space to basically spend most of the movie in a med-stasis tube.  We all know Carrie Fisher is a glowing force ghost in real life, so why not make her exit the film world too?  She died not long after filming wrapped, they could have given Leia a dignified exit and worked the rest of the story some other way, it would have made so much sense and would have avoided what is probably going to be an off screen death or worse a CGI death.  I'm pretty sure Carrie would have chosen to go out with a blast if they were able to ask her.
Second, less big thing that maybe shouldn't have been done: the entire Finn story line until the reunion with Rey, which was really touching. There is only one reason why Finn and Rose needed to go try and find the master hacker on the casino world, which they don't do and only end up finding a guy who betrays them to the First Order, and that is to introduce DJ, the character played by Benicio Del Toro, who is part and parcel of setting up the whole moral punch of the movie.  DJ gives Finn repeated lessons about how there are no "good guys" and that the galaxy far far away is every bit as morally ambivalent as our own.  I think they could have worked that into the plot without what amounts to a rather lengthy chase on cat-horse things and some scenes that look like Vegas crashed into Mos Eisley.
The third thing that really could have not happened, at least according to my daughter, is that Kylo Ren really didn't need to be as naked as he was in that one scene, but hey that's just a 12 year old's aesthetic critique.
What was done well was a connection with the themes that really made episodes IV through VI great.  People have critiqued the fact that The Force Awakens was essentially a total rip off of A New Hope and it was, but in a good way that is trying to advance the story past Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker.  In the second movie of this trilogy, Episode VIII, we have the connections being made to Return of the Jedi: the conversations between Ghost Yoda and Luke, the conversations between Grumpy Luke and Rey, the conversations between Kylo and Rey, they are all offering us evolution of the plot line about balance in the force.  There is enough sameness in the sequence of events to really see how The Last Jedi essentially leaves us at the same spot, story-wise that VI left us.  Snoke, as it turned out, was a giant skeletal red herring, which bummed out a lot of Geeks who had spent considerable time and effort inventing theories about his identity.  But Kylo managed to dispatch his Sith master a lot more cleanly than Vader did with Palpatine.  Kylo Ren evolved in this movie from whiny little punk to pretty serious bad guy in a way that makes me optimistic for where they're going with this arc.
By the end of The Force Awakens, I was quite frankly glad that Rey managed to slice Kylo up, so I didn't have to hear any more about his daddy issues.  By the end of The Last Jedi, I am so ready to see more Kylo.  Also, Rey is no longer the wide-eyed, over-matched orphan kid, and she is a character that is not at all governed by her origin story, which I think is a great direction to head with this.  The prequel trilogy gave me more than a stomachful of ancient prophecies about the chosen one and fulfilling destiny.  I'm liking that this movie basically established a good breaking point from all that sort of stuff and leaves Rey and Kylo, Finn, Poe and Rose free to tell a good story going forward.
The Yoda sighting proves that they will be credibly able to bring Luke and Yoda back at certain opportune moments to provide guidance from beyond.
Near the beginning of the movie, when Rey is trying to convince Luke that the rebellion needs him, he says something like, "what do you expect me to do, charge to the rescue swinging a laser sword?" I was personally glad that he didn't take up that challenge, it provides credibility to his character and honestly sets up what he actually did do in the end.  Honestly, I was afraid that they were going to turn these new movies into nostalgic retirement tours for the original cast, despite the fact that I knew Hamill, Ford and Fisher really didn't want to do it that way.  The new characters give me hope and a sense that they might take this thing in a direction that won't be so dead locked in to a known conclusion.  After all, wasn't it the big secret, that Vader was Anakin, that made Empire Strikes Back  the best of the movies?  I was personally glad that Rey's lineage is not apparently going to be the central plot point of these movies.  Do something new! No we can have new secrets and things to find out.
All of the homage points and scene parallels provide strong enough contacts with what was, we get it, but I'm 43 years old now, my son is older than I was when I started with these movies, I'm really hoping we can grow up a little at this point.