Here are my issues... in no particular order
1. Why waste Snoke like this? You spent an entire movie building him up, then another full scene showcasing his power, and then you kill him without us learning a single thing about him? I'm OK with him dying, but who the hell was he? And why was he so easily killed?
Did they spend a whole movie building him up? And I'm tired of the "we know nothing about Snoke" ****. Watch the OT, what do you know about the Emperor?
2. Rey's backstory is no longer interesting. Why do I even care about her now?
Why do you no longer care? Why does a backstory matter? What's Han's backstory?
3. Luke came across as a mopey baby and a really bad teacher
Luke was pretty mopey, he lost everything. Was he a bad teacher? I mean a reluctant teacher, but similar to Yoda a reluctant teacher who taught in the end.
4. Why is Finn still a thing? He is pointless. He's just annoying and provides no value to the plot
Well Finn is any number of things, but reality is he's pretty much the avatar for the audience to live through. Think about it, when you watch TFA, it's very likely you're starting the film from Finn's perspective as a ST.
5. Why didn't the new admiral tell Poe her plan? It would have saved us a massive waste of time from needing to go on the casino planet
Why did the new admiral need to tell Poe her plan? Why couldn't Poe have just done as he was told and not attempted to be a white knight?
6. Leia... floating in space? Uhh... OK. That was painful to watch. And if she could do that so easily... why couldn't Palpatine simply float back up after Vader threw him off the ledge?
We'll see what happens, but I'm assuming she was Gandalf'd back to life.
7. What was the point of the TFA? They spent the whole movie having a resistance take out a mega-dumb planet weapon... and here we are back and it didn't appear to make a dent in the first order at all. At what point do we care what the good guys are doing if we always know the bad guys will be uber powerful in the next film
You just described ANH and Empire, you realize that right?
8. What's the point of Captain Phasma?
Sequels Boba Fett
9. Luke being a hologram rather than in person was less cool for me. Why not simply go and sacrifice yourself like Obi-Wan did?
"Do you think this is gonna end with me standing down the first order with a laser sword" "This is not gonna end how you think it will" You missed this one by a million miles.
10. Why didn't the good guys use light-speeding into a star destroyer a million times before? I don't buy it
Few logical guesses. First this wasn't a Star Destroyer, this was Snoke's flag ship. It was much larger. I'm assuming the main reason no one tried to do this was difficulty. I would imagine trying this normally would result in a ton of misses. Als oif you bomb a destroyer with your capital ship that's a kin to swapping rooks in Chess, doesn't really do any good for either side. Except in this instance the other side can quickly manufacture more rooks. If you attempt with with an XWing, it would require a perfect shot, and you're losing one of a handful of pilots. If we look at history a big reason the Japanese started kamikaze bombing was they lost so many skilled pilots that they were more or less forced into this tactic.
11. Kylo Ren is the only interesting character left... and sadly he's way less cool than Vader ever was
Kylo Ren is probably the most interesting character in a Star Wars film period. Adam Driver is amazing.
12. I wish they had Kylo and Rey team up, and gone in that direction. Now, we're left with yet another Vader vs Luke story - with substantially less interesting characters
Disagree. Rey and Ren are both far more deep characters. All depth to Luke and Vader was done in other media.
I felt the movie had promise and could have gone in a cool direction. But it didn't, sadly. Oh well - I'll see the next one, but this was a letdown.