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I had fun watching it.
It’s kinda like Solo. It is fun. If you’re actually looking for reasons to hate it then you will find them, some legit, some take a little mental gymnastics to interpret so negatively. Let’s be honest though. You hate it because “Last Jedi” was an abomination.
I don’t like the prequels more than the sequels, but, the things I hate about the sequels (and there are a lot) I personally hate more than anything in the prequels, if that makes sense, and that make me hate the sequels more, while I’m much more indifferent to the prequels – they’re more blandly “meh” for me.
The sequels feel, to me, far more like cynical “we need to make more Star Wars content, because $$$” (and, I had the same “this feels like high-budget fan fiction” feeling) while with the prequels, I feel more like they wanted to tell a story and failed badly at executing that, from writing the premise out to full stories/scripts, to the choices they made for portrayals and performances.
The sequels execute bad story ideas better, in a lot of ways – the actors are mostly acting their little hearts out, for example, compared to the flat, wooden portrayals in the prequels – while the prequels squandered what could and should have been a really interesting story.
The downfall of Anakin Skywalker and the rise of the Empire are important concepts that are left vague in the Original Trilogy, so there was a reason to make the prequels – to elaborate on that, to flesh it out and show it and render it cinematically. I think, honestly, that story, told well, probably would not have been suitable or palatable to the broad audience these movies need to appeal to, because it would/should have been _extremely_ dark. They didn’t/couldn’t go there, and what we got was bland and watered down.
The sequels didn’t really need to be made at all, or at least, the sequels didn’t need to be _this_ story, a continuation of the “Skywalker Saga”. At least, I never wondered “what happened after this?” It’s a fairly believable “happily ever after” ending – Anakin redeemed, Emperor and Death Star destroyed, Han and Leia together, etc. Sure, you know there are going to be some tough times dealing with what’s left of the Empire, but it’s a bit like Lord of the Rings – the central, mystical force that was holding this huge, evil empire together, the “Sauron” of the Empire, is defeated – the Empire will be in disarray, across the Galaxy people will rise up and so on. It doesn’t really need to be shown. You might be able to make a movie out of it if there were more interesting ideas to it than just that. I’ve not read them, but I understand there are some well-regarded novels that explore some such concepts, I have no idea if any of them would have made good movies.
To continue this story with these characters, you have to make it turn out that a bunch of that stuff didn’t end up that good after all. You can do that, but I think it was way too abrupt.
Luke became an idiot and a coward who was going to kill his student at the first sign that his force powers _might_ be dangerous. Han had to revert to an older, shittier version of himself – a crappy guy who ditched his family to go be a crappy smuggler again. The Empire isn’t defeated at all, they (oh sorry, the “First Order”) are stronger and more organized than ever, with no explanation – not even a hand-wavy one – of how that happened. They just wanted to rush to what they thought was “the good stuff” – force powers and lightsabers and space battles – without taking the time to give any of their characters or situations and actual character or development.
All the stuff that had to happen between RotJ and TFA would probably have made a much more interesting movie than TFA, and then maybe they could have done 2 more movies resolving the concepts from that.