Millennials Strike Back: An Esoteric Reading of the Last Jedi

Throwing a hyperdrive on whatever mass you have handy is a whole different ball game. Unless the hyperdrive itself represents the dominant cost it should be at least two orders of magnitude cheaper going by the cost of ordnance vs the cost of a warship.

And even one order of magnitude would be enough. War is about economics as much as it is about winning battles. If you can force them to build ships that you can destroy at 1/10th the cost with no loss of life (people are a resource /Negan) you are doing good.

Ship to ship combat is not cheap or without risk either. Ships are damaged and lost and in a real war you can lose quite a few of them!

Maybe larger ships require larger, more expensive hyperdrive installations, and are more difficult to install - maybe it's not just a matter of bolting a hyperdrive unit onto something. There might be conduits you have to run all over and throughout the structure, there may be mass and balance concerns, etc.

I don't know enough about the SW universe to really back up my hypothesis. (One of the reasons I'm not a huge fan of the SW universe as a playground for the mind is that it's fairly inconsistent, and the Rule of Cool that another user mentioned tends to trump other considerations. In one sense it's freeing, and in another sense, any given work set in that universe is free to disregard large portions of previous works.)

That's not what I'm seeing at all. What I'm seeing is:

The originals, for all their flaws, established and maintained an expansive universe with internally consistent rules and characters. The plots made sense and plot holes rarely undermined the important story or thematic elements. The characters had consistent flaws and experienced growth and real character arcs. The new movies' plots' are barely coherent, shatter suspension of disbelief by constantly violating the rules and conventions of the setting, have characters that range from likeable but boring to annoying and unlikable, and include way too many awkward humor attempts with off-beat non-sequitors.

Luke Skywalker is an established character. He was a whiny, impulsive, stargazing youth who ventured into the unknown world beyond for adventure, experiencing struggle, hardship, and loss; finally overcoming those inner demons to rescue his friends (who had suffered because of him) and stand up to the Emperor and redeem his father. This is not to say that you can't turn him into a despondent, disillusioned recluse who casually considers cold-blooded murder, but you need to get him there somehow with a convincing narrative. What I'm seeing consistently is people do not buy the provided explanations. (Although one should also ask if this change really adds anything positive to the story)

The new movies, partiularly TFA and TLJ, completely unravel the established rules and established characters. And it's not that these rules are incredibly restrictive, there's volumes and volumes of Expanded Universe content exploring a huge range of themes and narratives and virtually all of them make a reasonable effort to respect and adhere to the established rules and characters in the Universe. (My favorite is the Thrawn Trilogy from Timothy Zahn, while others like Knights of the Old Republic video game...). Disney easily could have told broadly appealing Star Wars stories without violating all these rules and irritating old-school fans for no reason.

Could it be possibly that people are still holding onto the idea fed to those of us born in the 80's and onward that every one of us is "special", that our dreams will come true if we just believe in ourselves and never give up?

Well, the Rey character seems like the perfect icon for entitled Millenials. She's special just because she's her. She's a nobody but can do everything better than anyone with no effort so long as she has the self-esteem to act. Where Luke had to struggle and learn and grow Rey just mostly coasts.

Also note that young Anakin's narrative was essentially "the fall of a prodigy," so it made sense for him to be exceptional in many ways from the beginning. All the established Jedi characters observed him to be something special and unusual (midi-chlorians were stupid at the detail level, but at least it's purpose in the plot consistent with the story goals). Lucas even added a prophecy narrative to explain Anakin's exceptional powers. And even then Anakin still has to train.