Punished_Blinx posted... Like there's a reason JJ Abrams is specifically known for 'Mystery boxes'
The guy is known for giving out satisfying potential questions. But his focus has never been answers.
Dude gives TED talks about Mystery Boxes!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpjVgF5JDq8
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/5/3/AACT2jAAEdXV.jpg
The point of Snoke and Rey was to speculate over things that he didn't really care about giving an answer to. The question is more interesting than the answer. It's his thing.
Then when he's given the movie that resolves those answers we get "Somehow Palpatine Returned" which really is still just another mystery box for people to figure out later. Mystery is the catalyst for imagination.
It's why he didn't care about setting up how the First Order got set up or how Snoke managed to do it. Mystery is the catalyst for imagination. In a sense that's what Star Wars also was before the PT to be totally fair to him. We didn't need to know who the Emperor was, what the Jedi were like etc. because it didn't matter to Luke's journey. The imagination of those things carried that franchise along until the prequels and basically everything outside of the movies.
The problem is that Star Wars isn't some artsy horror movie. It's a narrative fantasy. His "mystery box" approach loses a lot of oomph when it's in a story that relies heavily on satisfactory payoff.
And star wars is absolutely dependent on the "buildup, payoff" structure. It has been since 1977. And the payoffs in the sequel trilogy were uniformly crap. Between Johnson deciding we didn't need them, and Rise shoehorning in completely unearned "capstone" moments, the whole thing is a flailing mess.