The Last Jedi 2: The Next Last Jedi

[Aeson]

The movies did a poor job of showing that. Even after TFA, everyone was immediately coming up with theories about Rey's bloodline to explain her strength, instead of her just... being strong, without needing some kind of super-special pedigree, because we too had been conditioned to see the Force as hereditary by Lucas.

The reason why "everyone" was making theories about Rey's ancestry after The Force Awakens is that the film makers decided to make a big deal out of her ancestry - or rather, they decided to treat it as some important mystery. If the movie had ignored the question of Rey's parentage entirely rather than treating it as something important and dropping heavy-handed hints that she's in some way connected to the Original Trilogy characters (she resembles Leia and Padme, Anakin's/Luke's lightsaber "calls" to her, Maz expects Han to be able to tell her about Rey's background, Rey has a vision or flashback of child-Rey in Jedi clothing confronted by, presumably, Kylo Ren and his Knights with what might be a burning Jedi Temple in the background, etc), I don't think that most people would have cared what her ancestry was and the "Rey is the daughter of Luke and ?" or "Rey is the daughter of Han and Leia" or other such theories wouldn't have been so widespread.

For starters, this is beyond melodramatic; they've hardly "thrown out everything." Many aspects of the Force remain unchanged.

But even if your statement were accurate, well - if that's the mental jump you need to rationalize what they've done, then fine, feel free to tell yourself that. The reality though is that it's their setting, not yours, and they can change it however they feel they need to, in both subtle and drastic ways. If you really see the changes as large enough to make this not be Star Wars anymore, your only remaining choice is to vote with your wallet, or not.

Perhaps I should have quoted pendell instead, since upon re-reading your post my post was more directly a response to this:

They wanted a clean slate not only to tell new stories, but to rewrite the very physics of the GFFA to support those new stories.

which was in the pendell quote you had in the post of yours that I quoted. If wiping the EU was to allow them to rewrite everything (what I take "the physics" to mean in pendell's statement) about the Star Wars setting, then they may as well have just made a new setting and been done with it.

Here's what happens to people who mutiny is pretty much every naval service that has ever existed: they get executed.

Ringleaders of mutinies get executed (though not always), and in the modern world they tend to get trials first. The rest of the mutineers tend to get away with black marks on their records, being drummed out of the service, or being imprisoned.

Also, I'd note that the Resistance didn't really have time to make an example out of Poe between when his mutiny was suppressed and when they discovered they had bigger problems - like being reduced to all of about ten people - than punishing mutineers, and for some unexplained reason they'd chosen to capture rather than kill him in suppressing the mutiny.

But it wasn't needed. That's the whole point I'm making. We were only conditioned to think it was by the Skywalker dynasty, which was drummed into us not just by the movies, but over subsequent decades by the EU too (Mara Jade, Jacen, etc etc ad nauseam.)

I mostly agree. There was no particular need for an explanation of why Rey is unusually powerful. Unfortunately, The Force Awakens made a big deal out of the mystery of her parentage and The Last Jedi gave us some chosen one sans prophecy nonsense.

I would nevertheless have liked some explanation for why she's capable of manifesting powers that we had previously only seen out of trained Force adepts, beyond or preferably without the chosen one sans prophecy nonsence which sounded a lot like it's headed towards Law of Conservation of Evil and Misery territory. E.g. the vision/flashback sequence in The Force Awakens being confirmed as a flashback/suppressed memory of her time as young Jedi trainee.