I liked the movie, therefore I'm deluded, and I'm in the wrong for encouraging others to watch it instead of listening to people who say "don't bother"?

Yeah, sure. How about you bite me, okay?

Even I don't think TLJ is perfect, as I clearly stated, but I think the most strident criticisms of it are unfounded.

Luke's characterization seems like the most common target. Well, to me Luke feels completely in character. The pessimistic, defeatist, emotional Luke growing up to be an old pessimistic, defeatist, emotionally broken hermit. It's his natural disposition. Even Yoda calls him out on his old bad habits. And the idea that Luke Skywalker, the man who did this in a moment of anger and weakness:

...might also in a moment of weakness ignite his lightsaber after seeing what lied within Ben's mind but still refrain from striking him down seems completely plausible to me. It seems to me that a lot of fans had this idea in their head that Old Luke was supposed to have become some wise Jedi Master, an Obi Wan 2.0 or whatever. Or something more akin to however Luke was portrayed in the old Legends material. Instead we got OT Luke with grey hair and some people called foul. In other words, their headcanon was ignored. A legacy character's portrayal not conforming to your personal idea of how they should be portrayed does not make the movie bad.

What's next? "Rey is a Mary Sue!"? Please. She's even more flawed in this film. Still stubborn, impulsive, naive, hotheaded, and nothing goes according to plan for her (in keeping with "failure" as an overarching theme of the movie). There's nothing about her any more Mary Sue-ish than, say, Luke using the Force to get the kill shot on the Death Star despite next to no training, or young Anakin whoops-ing his way to getting the victory for the good guys at the Battle of Naboo.

Snoke's death? Not really much different than Palpatine in the OT. Snoke and the Emperor were both one-note Bigger Bads who served as a plot device to advance another character's story arc and spent their brief screen times engaging in evil gloating. Vader killed Palpatine to save his son and redeem himself. Kylo Ren killed Snoke to achieve his own goals. And just like Snoke, Palpatine had no character background or anything. His history was a blank. We just knew he was the leader of the bad guys. Palpatine didn't become fleshed out until the prequels. Snoke may be the Bigger Bad, but Kylo Ren is the main antagonist, and it's his story that matters on the villainous side. The fact that some people didn't get the back story they wanted out of Snoke does not make the movie bad.

The "Holdo Maneuver"? Pointless technical quibbles easily handwaved away, and such minutiae not immediately satisfying your questions does not make a movie bad (as if the writers are obligated to explain to you in the film itself how they view the economics and tactical usefulness of a lightspeed kamikaze in a way that satisfies you). And besides, it's an awesome scene.

Let's be honest. There is precious little in the way of legitimate film criticism coming from the vocal minority that are TLJ's haters. It's not a bad movie by any stretch. Rabid fans not liking something does not make that film bad. Ishtar, Howard the Duck, Plan 9 from Outer Space, Manos: The Hands of Fate, Dragonball Evolution, and the works of Uwe Boll and Seltzer & Friedberg are bad movies. The Last Jedi is not, even if it doesn't satisfy your needs and desires as a fan.

Rotten Tomatoes scores for all the Star Wars films:

A New Hope: 93%
The Empire Strikes Back: 95%
Return of the Jedi: 81%

The Phantom Menace: 53%
Attack of the Clones: 66%
Revenge of the Sith: 80%

The Force Awakens: 93%
The Last Jedi: 91%
Rogue One: 84%
Solo: 70%

The general consensus among critics is that the Episodes I & II are average or mediocre films, with RotS being pretty good (and the general consensus among most of the general audience agrees with that assessment, with RotS being considered the high mark of an overall unimpressive prequel trilogy). Meanwhile, the general critical consensus is that, Episodes VII & VIII are excellent, on par with the first two films, and that Rogue One is pretty good, too, and Solo merely decent at best. I think that's a fair assessment of the Disney-era films.

I know it might be controversial to say so, but film critics are usually right (note the qualifying language I'm using and will continue to use; critics are humans and therefore not perfect). They are typically people that went to film school, studied film seriously as art, and are generally best equipped to be objective about what makes for good film, such as the quality of its writing, cinematography, screenplay, acting, set/art/costume design, etc. General audiences are not (fans especially can be too obsessive to be objective, case in point the more toxic segments of Star Wars fandom). When critics universally praise a movie, it's probably a good movie, even if it's not for everyone. When they universally pan a movie, it's probably a bad movie, even if some people may unironically enjoy it as dumb fun (and there's nothing wrong with enjoying an objectively bad movie). Audiences too often think that critics are only right if the critics' opinions are congruent with their own. If critics praise a movie they don't like or pan a movie they do like, they call foul, but if their tastes agree with that of the critics they nod their head in agreement. We see this all the time. As an example of the latter, every time "Anticipated Blockbuster X" gets glowing reviews the people looking forward to the movie trot out the RT score to say "See! It's a good movie!" Meanwhile, movies that are legitimately mediocre films sometimes become hits with general audiences (live-action Transformers, anyone?).

Also, your questions about the First Order and the Resistance are easily answered. It's clear from the films that the Empire didn't just vanish, but reconstituted itself under a new name, and that the Resistance is Leia's own personal paramilitary organization separate from the New Republic that, unlike the Republic, sees the FO for the threat it is. With only the Resistance seeing the FO as a serious threat and the FO holding up in the Unknown Regions (a barely-explored part of the galaxy that was established in the fiction long ago and retained as canon), the idea that they could keep Starkiller Base a secret (hell, the Rebellion only learned about the DS2 because Palpatine let them). It's easy to put two and two together. There's also a lot of details in sources outside the films. If you want a wiki summary, here you go:

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Resistance
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/First_Order
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Cold_war

The point I was trying to make was that neither Luke nor young Anakin nor Rey are Mary Sue characters. They all have their own strengths and weaknesses that are perfectly explicable in-story.

Luke blew up the Death Star by using the Force to help make the kill shot despite no real training, but he's also a farm boy who lived a relatively coddled life and wasn't physically formidable in the beginning, and whether as a young or old man he always had a defeatist, pessimistic attitude. Rey is a powerful but flawed character. Her individual strengths are clear from the film and fleshed out even more in ancillary material. It's well established that she does have experience as a pilot and is familiar first-hand with the Falcon, plus in supplemental material it's established that she also has a flight training program, so the idea of her being able to fly the Falcon (after nearly crashing it during take-off) is no less implausible than Luke being good at piloting a military fighter craft in actual combat after using what amounts to a small civilian craft (imagine going from a single-engine Cessna or and old WW2 piston plane to a modern fighter jet), even getting a confirmed kill against a trained TIE fighter pilot. Also, Rey has lived almost her whole life as a junker (more experience with machines!) on a harsh world where she almost certainly routinely encountered thugs and so had to learn to defend herself, so being proficient in hand-to-hand combat is not only unusual but is arguably expected given her circumstances. Her weaknesses are clear as well. She's hot-headed, impulsive, stubborn, naive, a bit ignorant, and can be a horrible judge of character at times (Luke was right: turning Kylo to the light did not go the way she thought it would), not to mention she almost gave herself over to the Dark Side during Luke's lessons.

There are plenty of powerful characters in fiction that are nevertheless flawed individuals and therefore not Mary Sues. Rey is one of them. There's nothing uniquely or unusually "perfect" about her compared to other SW protags that makes her a Mary Sue.

The point I was trying to make was that neither Luke nor young Anakin nor Rey are Mary Sue characters. They all have their own strengths and weaknesses that are perfectly explicable in-story.

Luke blew up the Death Star by using the Force to help make the kill shot despite no real training, but he's also a farm boy who lived a relatively coddled life and wasn't physically formidable in the beginning, and whether as a young or old man he always had a defeatist, pessimistic attitude. Rey is a powerful but flawed character. Her individual strengths are clear from the film and fleshed out even more in ancillary material. It's well established that she does have experience as a pilot and is familiar first-hand with the Falcon, plus in supplemental material it's established that she also has a flight training program, so the idea of her being able to fly the Falcon (after nearly crashing it during take-off) is no less implausible than Luke being good at piloting a military fighter craft in actual combat after using what amounts to a small civilian craft (imagine going from a single-engine Cessna or and old WW2 piston plane to a modern fighter jet), even getting a confirmed kill against a trained TIE fighter pilot. Also, Rey has lived almost her whole life as a junker (more experience with machines!) on a harsh world where she almost certainly routinely encountered thugs and so had to learn to defend herself, so being proficient in hand-to-hand combat is not only unusual but is arguably expected given her circumstances. Her weaknesses are clear as well. She's hot-headed, impulsive, stubborn, naive, a bit ignorant, and can be a horrible judge of character at times (Luke was right: turning Kylo to the light did not go the way she thought it would), not to mention she almost gave herself over to the Dark Side during Luke's lessons.

There are plenty of powerful characters in fiction that are nevertheless flawed individuals and therefore not Mary Sues. Rey is one of them. There's nothing uniquely or unusually "perfect" about her compared to other SW protags that makes her a Mary Sue.

Because user scores can be easily influenced by large numbers of people acting in bad faith. The Last Jedi's RT and Meta user scores were clearly subject to review bombing. It's not the first work of fiction to be subject to this, nor was it the last. Vote brigading (of which review bombing is a subset of or at least closely related to) isn't anything unusual on the internet. Just this year we saw Captain Marvel being a high-profile film subject to attempted review bombing on RT (mainly by "anti-SJWs" angry at Brie Larson; after the film came out and became a smash hit, many of its haters thought Disney bought most of the tickets for it—which could be construed as securities fraud and would be bad for business anyway—simply because it defied their belief in "get woke, go broke"). Last year there was a similar attempt to sabotage Black Panther's user review scores. Such behavior is rarely a critique of the artistic merits of a film or game or what have you, but rather exists primarily as an act of protest. BOM estimated that over 67 million tickets were sold domestically based on average ticket prices. Even allotting for 20% of that to be from repeat viewers, that's still over 53M people who went to see it in just the U.S. and Canada. The 100k people taking to RT to drop 1/10 scores amounts to less than 0.2% of that.

When a film like TLJ gets a 90+% average review score from professional critics (the people who actually do study and critique film seriously as an art form and thus are more likely to be objective than fans in regards to its artistic merits) and wins multiple awards but a bunch of disgruntled fans (and maybe more than a few anti-SJWs) give it a bunch of 1/10 reviews to try to drag the average down, I think I'm going to side with the professionals. A character being portrayed in a way that isn't congruent with someone's idea of how they should be portrayed or a secondary villain not getting sufficient background information before being offed or quibbles over fictional technology does not make a film worthy of a 1/10 score. The vocal minority of people who are that irate over the film clearly feel that way not because they have legitimate criticisms of the screenplay, script, cinematography, acting, visuals, and other artistic aspects of the film, but rather because they feel it did not meet their desires as fans. "Critical dissonance" does exist, but this is ridiculous. There is nothing objectively wrong with the film that puts it in league with legitimate all-time critical flops. You know. The films that actually are cinematic atrocities.

Also, The Last Jedi fares far better with user review scores elsewhere. Audience polling from CinemaScore and comScore showed the vast majority of general audiences loved it. User reviews of the Blu-ray release on Amazon give it 4/5 stars. On IMDb two-thirds of user scores give rate it a 7/10 or better (20.4% rate it 7/10, 21.2% rate is 8/10, and 24.7% rate it either a 9/10 or 10/10). The median score is a 7/10 and the weighted average score is 7.1/10. If you knock off the 6.8% of user scores that were 1/10, the non-weighted average improves from 6.8 to 7.3, better than Episodes I & II and Solo, roughly on par with Episode III, not too far behind The Force Awakens, and only a bout a point to a point-and-half behind the OT films. And looking at the percentage of users who rated it a 7/10 or better it compares well to other movies in the franchise (and far better than Episodes I & II). That's not bad. That's pretty good. Not as good as what the critics thought, but still far from the worst in the franchise, much less "worst film ever."

When you don't have mass numbers of people vote brigading out of protest, a more realistic picture emerges. The vast majority of people thought it ranged from pretty good to really good. A vocal minority deciding to organize a mass protest against a film by sabotaging its average user score is not the behavior of well-adjusted adults. It's the behavior of a fringe group of people with an axe to grind. All over a movie. A movie! A movie that nearly everyone else outside their small but intensely angry circle liked. You'd swear they were a religious cult and that Rian Johnson blasphemed against their god or something. Why should I take that kind of behavior seriously? That's a rhetorical question. I shouldn't take it seriously. It's juvenile behavior and I'm not going to defend or excuse or empathize with it. Some people need to grow the fuck up. If someone feels the need to review bomb a film or dogpile anyone who defends it, then I have to question their maturity. And if they feel the need to call others things "ignorant" or "deluded" for liking and defending the movie and encouraging others to watch it, then I'm not even going to bother engaging with them because they're not worth my time. I've seen enough childish behavior on the internet to know I shouldn't trust negative user scores in these circumstances. It is not legitimate film criticism. It's a farce.

Visuals shouldn't be much of a factor when looking at a movie critically. They're mostly dependent on budget rather than skill. What's so hard to comprehend about not liking bad writing and bland unoriginal concepts? You're not even making sense, you just said TLJ is a waste a time, how can you then say you don't understand why people say it's bad and that it's a worthy experience? You're about as consistent as the sequel trilogy lol.

I agree. And when looking at the movie critically, most critics and movie goers thought it was top notch.

If you just don't like her, that's fine. My problem is with the hyperbole coming from some people. They confuse "Character I don't like" or "character I think is poorly written" with "Mary Sue" if the character is powerful or displays any sort of competence. Being powerful doesn't make a character a Mary Sue. Neither does being skilled, especially if the skills are not unusual and can be easily justified in-story. The term Mary Sue is meant to apply to characters, almost always self-inserts/"author avatars," who are idealized to an absurd degree and are nominally flawless. It originated from a parody of self-insert Star Trek fanfiction from the early 70s. But in today's internet culture the term just gets abused.