My apologies for misunderstanding you were talking about your friend. I haven't lapped up everything Disney Star Wars related minus RoS. I don't care for Kenobi, Book of Boba Fett, I'm glad the Cara Dune project was cancelled because that was going to be ****. A handful of other projects that were intended for kids I never watched and I did watch Resistance but didn't really care about it except for I loved Donald Faison's rodian. And there were many comics and other things I haven't jumped in on. I Also am largely out on TFA now. I still can watch it but I realize how shallow it was and how much of a waste of a movie it was because 0 character development happened.
Prequel Hate wasn't just Phantom Menace. Attack of the Clones was hated. THe I don't like Sand has become memefied to what people like. But it was heavily criticized back then.
I"ve said it a billion times I wouldn't have written the Force Awakens the way they did. To me it was not the wisest choice to leave Luke on the sidelines and make a map to find him the MacGuffin. Especially when in the big picture of it, where the Empire already basically had everything mapped out so really the First Order could have been sending ships with probe droids to that area and have them scout all the areas for signs of him. I understand space is massive yada yada yada. But the fact it wasn't a strategy implies the First Order is so smart and powerfu lthey know exactly who has the map to skywalker but so dump they couldn't send probe droids to see the part of the map no one else had.
That being said with what happened in TFA you have to explain why Luke wasn't there. Why wasn't he hopping in his X-Wing when he felt millions of people die when they destroyed Hosnian Prime? Well if he's not connected to the force he wouldn't know they died, if he's totalled his X-Wing he wouldn't leave. All logical jumps and aren't a defeat of his character if his belief was he was harming people by being around them. Which is a leap, but it's not outlandish. Luke in RotJ left his friends because he believed he would compromise the mission.
I agree TFA did a bad job, I'm not going to argue that point. But what would people expect from TLJ?
I get what you are saying with what do you do with Luke after the TFA nonsense. The point is it never should have gotten there. That's why the entirity of the sequels are hot garbage.
Luke leaving his friends in ROTJ is not even close to the same thing. He left because he was a literal homing beacon that Vader and Palps could sense. That was Luke's reasoning. Not that it mattered because Palps knew what was happening with their mission anyways. Being a monk type character was the old Jedi mindset. In a way it gave way to Anakin becoming Vader. Yoda warned Luke of this with his attachments to his friends. Saw what it did to Anakin with Padme. But Luke fought through that and came out with a new understanding of how the Jedi could evolve. Attachments are not a hinderance and can be a strength.
The sequels totally erase all that with the garbage they put out. It's just bad. Palpatine coming back makes Anakin's sacrfice meaningless. It's like the OG movies don't matter at all.