Eh, no. It borrows similarities from the plot, but the characters are vastly different. That's a fact. 

Wrong and doesn't give a shit that he is. Destroys why it killed the movie for him 😂 

Call me crazy but.... wouldn't blacking out an entire sun be worse than blowing up some planets. They killed a solar system every time they charged it!!

And the explosion wasn't that big. Just goes to show, solar power isn't the way to go. Power that bad boy with windmills!

It really shows that you didn't read it, nor do you have understanding of the concept of story telling. Plot is a big point, but characters are a bigger one. With radically different characters comes a radically different approach. 

While I agree it sucked and prefer Han to the other old characters, I think he died due to him not wanting to be in Star Wars anymore. He was barely convinced to be in V and VI -he probably only agreed to VII because he knew Han died, something he had wanted to happen for a long time now. He also said he wants nothing to do with the young Han Solo movie

Yea, story often depends on all kinds of personal and financial "non-artistic" reasons.

I agree with your assessment, but I will enjoy people reacting to my "summary" lol.

Exactly my thoughts when I saw that scene. He wanted to get out of the trilogy as early as possible.

Don't even start with science stuff when it comes to Star Wars. Absolutely EVERYTHING is wrong in these movies in that regard, so it's no use talking about it.

Anyway, because I'm in the mood, I'll answer your question. I didn't see the movie and don't know how exactly that blocking should take place. But in any case, you won't kill a solar system with that. Not even a single planet. Imagine the sund would be blocked, earth would be fine for several years. By "fine" I mean that a lot of the population would die, but anyway. Earth wouldn't be TOTALLY fucked. The planet produces heat itself, which is enough for life in certain regions. On top of that, you can't block gamma rays, so the earth would still get energy in some form. But even if the sun simply disappeared, earth wouldn't go down instantly. The heat would go down with time without a sun, but we're talking about centuries at this point at the very least. So the question is, do they block the sun for good? Or just for a limited time? Say they are blocking the sun for a whole year. The planet would get dark as fuck, sure, but other than that, not too much would happen. If they block the sun for good, yeah, the planet is fucked - in about 10,000 years. 

Blowing up a planet is it's own beast. There's no turning back if you do something like that, that's it. Aaaaaaanyway, it's as good as impossible. To literally blow up a planet like earth with a weapon that turns mass perfectly fine into energy (a nuclear reactor has an efficiency of about 1 %, so yeah...) you would need the masses of 10 jupiters - at the very least. It just ain't happening. It would be better to just change the course of a big ass asteroids, of which are plenty in pretty much every solar system, using a gravity tractor.

edit: Oh, and screw both solar power and windmills. Way too inefficient. Nuclear power is the way to go, it's best for humans and nature. We should use our reactors from today until we got nuclear fusion figured out, if you ask me. 

Pretty much all the issues in the OP can also be applied to A New Hope if you take that movie by itself. Luke's backstory started and ended at "whiny kid who worked on a farm", we knew next to nothing about the Empire or the rebels, a random planet we knew next to nothing about was destroyed, and so on.

Was the new movie perfect? No, but I can't help but feel you wanted to hate the movie.