Easier doesn't mean best.
Sure, but everything else adds more complications. More potential ways to fuck it up.
Having the Imperial Remnant as the enemy welds it just as well. PT: Birth of the Empire. OT: Empire Defeated. ST: Empire tries to make a comeback and is finished off.
I can't really agree here. It's a story in the same setting, but the fact remains that the Big Bad was killed off at end of RotJ. So the only way forward is to go with a "legacy of evil" angle.
Thrawn worked as a new villain, for instance, because his last ditch attempt to bring back Imperial supremacy took place a mere five years after Endor, when a substantial part of the galaxy was still contested. It makes for a good follow-up because it stars the same OT heroes in the lead roles, and presents a logical "aftermath" scenario in a realistic time-frame. Something like that would not work the same way 30+ years after Endor, with a new generation of heroes in the lead.
What I'm trying to say is: the sequels are by definition distant from the preceding saga. The villain of the last three films? Dead. The heroes of the preceding films? Old. The conflict? Over. So, unless we somehow tie this trilogy to the preceding two in a more substantial manner, having new Imperials as baddies isn't enough. This isn't "the last three episodes". This is "
Star Wars: The Next Generation". And that's okay, but as far as
Trek is concerned, nobody had the impression that TNG was a new season of TOS or something. It was a new "saga" set in the same universe.
TRoS just brings back Palpatine because Abrams had no other ideas, sure, but that's simple desperation. If we look at TFA and TLJ, what's the actual connection to the other two trilogies? What makes the sequels into "the third act of the saga", as opposed to "another story in the same setting"?
Lucas's ideas, at least, clearly aimed to tie the sequels far more closely to the other six films:
1) His initial plan was to put the rebuilding of the Republic front-and-centre. The overall myth-act then becomes one of decline from good to evil (prequels), followed by the reign of evil (OT), and then the restoration of good (sequels). You have to wipe out the dark legacy of a quarter-century of tyranny, and rebuild the galaxy. In this context, Imperial die-hards, fanatics, criminals, etc. function as the villains. (Resurrected Maul as a criminal kingpin or what-have-you fits into this concept as well.) They are the results of Palpatine's evil, and the struggle is only complete once not only the Emperor is gone, but this evil legacy as well. But note that this
only works with sequels made c. 2000 (less than 20 years after Endor), as Lucas initially envisioned it. Because if you wait longer than that, the heroes look like morons who haven't gotten anything done even though Palpy has been dead for decades.
2) The idea that Lucas seems to have settled on by 2012: make evil Force ghost Palpatine the villain. Then, it doesn't matter that decades have passed. In fact, that can be a salient point. The driving problem of the story is that
despite decades having passed, everything still isn't quite right with the galaxy. There are still bad guys around (either Imperials who set up a Remnant, or some shadowy crime syndicate). The heroes can't seem to stamp out evil, specifically
because there is an evil spectre manipulating events from behind the scenes. Ghostly Palpatine also corrupted one of Luke's students. All this means that there is
one villain for all the trilogies. In the prequels, he was masquerading as a good guy leading the Republic, in the OT he was the overt tyrant, and now in the sequels, he is the hidden spectre who continues to exert influence from beyond the grave. A "phantom menace", indeed. So the final victory of good
can't happen until the evil spirit is completely exorcised.
Both these approaches make a lot of sense when you're trying to tell an altogether cohesive tri-trilogy saga, and doing your best despite the fact that Episode VI was actually written as the Grand Finale. Keep in mind: there's loads of television series that write their Grand Finale because they think they're getting cancelled... and then they get renewed against expectation, and the writers have to come up with new stuff, even though the actual climax has been passed. Usually, this ends very poorly. The sequels face this exact problem.
And that's why "Empire tries to make a comeback",
by itself, isn't sufficient. You actively have to prove that this really is the third act of the greater saga. And that takes effort. You've got to tie it all together. Lucas at least did his best to achieve that. Disney... didn't.
This is not to say that there aren't other ways to achieve the same effect. Some may indeed be better than bringing back Palpatine. But all of them will require a lot of effort to weave this new trilogy into the fabric of the saga. And in less straight-forward ways than the obvious and easy "
yup, it's still Palpatine, even now". I don't believe for a second that the people in charge of the sequels were remotely capable of managing that. Which leads me back to Hamill's remark. They should just have listened to Lucas, because he evidently understood the story better than they did.