Lucasfilm had an operating income of nearly a billion a year even before the new trilogy, Disney basically gave George Lucas a handful of loose change for it - not that the man specifically set out to make a great deal with his former company. Star Wars has a mindshare way beyond the critical success of a couple of movies, and standards aren't exactly right. No excuses here for making the new movie the cheap copy of a previous one. I mean, Cameron spent $500 million with Avatar, copied the plot from Pocahontas and went on to make billions, at least Abrams and the others at least should have plagiarized something else than the very series they were making a movie on. That would have been less jarring TBH.

OT - I just watched it yesterday after avoiding a whole week of crowded sessions. Excelent movie. Much better than the knock-off that I mentioned already. For the first time we got a sense of how terrifying the superweapons can be, when there's characters and locations were invested on at stake, instead of planets we are seeing exactly the moment before they go caput. Also loved watching Vader make his way through the rebel scum. Amazing. CGI Tarkin was great; Leia was a bit "eh", but I guess they could still fix it on subsequent releases, and overall it doesn't detract from the whole experience.

Star Wars VII was guaranteed to make a billion dollars, but the issue was Disney wanted it to make a minimum of 1.5 billion which is incredibly rare.  It is 100% these movies will make money, the expectation from corporate is they make a certain amount of profit.

My expectations for VIII are that it will be good, but not great.  I hope they understand so much of what Empire great was not just "being dark", but that it expanded the universe and gave us great characters such as Lando or Yoda.

I agree Rogue One was first time since Empire Strikes Back I had any fear about the Empire and appreciated their scope and power.  The detruction of the city was actually scarier than the destruction of a planet or planets for me.  That sense of inevitable death from the ground was haunting.  I do wish that spending more time with Jyn and Kasian gave it a bit more emotional punch.

Just saw the film, and I must admit it was great. Blows TFA easilly of the water. Not sure do I want to see episode 8, as it's going to be a dissappointment anyway after this film.

The beginning felt a little confusing at first, but didn't really matter after the film started rolling.
The character played by Donnie Yen was pretty cool. He clearly knows the force, but is untrained to use it. Other than that, reminds me of Yoda in Empire Strikes Back.

Overall the characters were good, as they were viewed as characters that are not perfect. Pretty much the same fashion with the original trilogy, and opposed to the naivistic prequel trilogy, where good guys are righterous good guys and bad guys are speeding and stealing candy because they are bad guys. Pretty much like how Marvel characters differ from DC characters.
The dynamics between the main characters was good.
CGI characters were horrible, I would say they were at videogame level if there already weren't games with more credible/life-like CGI. At least for the key role with lots of screen time, it would've been better to use a live actor (see what I did there).
Darth Vader was ok. One thing I however can't get over with, is how Darth Vader is a character that's running errands for the emperor in the original trilogy, whereas Rogue One he's apparently running his own scheme behind the emperors back (because he wanted the death star being kept as secret from empire). He's turning against tbe emperor in the original after he finds out Luke is his son, yes, but that's more like being opportunistic and figuring out his family in the end is more important than his loyalty for the emperor.
I always thought the ventilation shaft weakness in the death star was a design flaw, that nobody cared to fix because of the empire being too arrogant to do so, but this was quite good and creative solution.
Ending was quite sad, and it makes you think what had happened differently if the rebellion hadn't come for help.