The whole "they didn't have a plan for the sequel trilogy" thing strikes me as complete bunk, especially when you consider there was no plan between the OT films (Luke and Leia's parentage/relation being an obvious sign of this), and that A New Hope (or Saga of the Whills or whatever) would have been an interminable slog had it not been edited down to a single, consumable script.
I also think Last Jedi (the first movie in over a decade I saw twice on the big screen) gets a real bad rap for taking some of Force Awakens' JJ-style mystery boxes and smashing them in the garage with a hammer, but all those moves are "yes, and"'s which address immediate story concerns and leave narrative threads wide open for the next movie to explore; maybe it doesn't move the baton in the same direction as Force Awakens telegraphs, but it's still progressing forwards. I'm not a huge fan of Trevorrow, but I've read a synopsis of Duel of the Fates and at least it continues carrying the baton forward.
It's kinda ironic that the MCU introduced the idea of a film franchise which is planned out and cohesive, even though there are many, many examples of course corrections and in-the-moment rejiggering which illustrate the need to focus on and deliver a single, cohesive movie.
