Agree on that point. There's a LOT of compelling directions they could have taken this in, a lot of them centered the whole "we won, now what?" question.
When I was a kid I had some Stackpole novels that touched on that. In his portrayal the New Republic had more than their own share of sleazy politicians, and struggled to effectively transform from a resistance into governing....not helped because the Imperials literally GAVE them Coruscant pre-seeded with a biological weapon precisely in order to exploit that weakness.
There's a lot of potential ways this could have gone other than a re-skin. Plot lines exploring the responsible use of power and its corrupting effects, usurpation of a good cause, the resulting power vacuum from the Emperor's fall, or even just the character's family dynamics all would have been interesting. Hell what made some parts of the Abrams movie passable was that the first parts of the film reflected a level of effort made to show that the setting had been heavily impacted by the war.
Even going more in-depth in the divide between the rebel hardliners and the more "moderates" who just want peace would have been much more interesting than what we got. It would have created a massive challenge to the existing Dark/Light side paradigm that would have allowed the old films to be "deconstructed" in a way that resembles a Socratic critique rather than what we got, which resembles a tantruming toddler pissing on everything.
When I was a kid I had some Stackpole novels that touched on that. In his portrayal the New Republic had more than their own share of sleazy politicians, and struggled to effectively transform from a resistance into governing....not helped because the Imperials literally GAVE them Coruscant pre-seeded with a biological weapon precisely in order to exploit that weakness.
There's a lot of potential ways this could have gone other than a re-skin. Plot lines exploring the responsible use of power and its corrupting effects, usurpation of a good cause, the resulting power vacuum from the Emperor's fall, or even just the character's family dynamics all would have been interesting. Hell what made some parts of the Abrams movie passable was that the first parts of the film reflected a level of effort made to show that the setting had been heavily impacted by the war.
Even going more in-depth in the divide between the rebel hardliners and the more "moderates" who just want peace would have been much more interesting than what we got. It would have created a massive challenge to the existing Dark/Light side paradigm that would have allowed the old films to be "deconstructed" in a way that resembles a Socratic critique rather than what we got, which resembles a tantruming toddler pissing on everything.