I love your post and how you hit the nail on the head with a lot of things.

I think the biggest downfall of the trilogy, even bigger than the whole pissing contest between 2 directors, is the lack of a cohesive plot outline for the trilogy. No idea if they even had a creative bible or something, but were the sequels even written out as a whole trilogy in the first place? It seemed like each movie was written in isolation from one another rather than having some outline of the story beats and character arcs unfold over the course of 3 movies regardless of the actual writing and directing done. It’s a shame too because we get to see some really fuckin cool shit from the sequels never play out, like the Knights of Ren, Finn being Disney’s take on Kyle Katarn, Poe potentially being a more war hero kind of take on the Han Solo archetype, Rey being a Palpatine and her struggle with the Dark Side, Kylo struggling with a pull to the Light Side, a jaded and bitter Luke, exploring the idea of some people supplying both the good and bad guys in a war… like, there was so many cool things they introduced, and then they either wrote it out in the worst possible way like with Luke’s character assassination in TLJ or the idea got ruined or tossed aside in the next movie like Snoke and the Knights of Ren.

I think one reason people aren’t so keen on the sequels is because of how much potential the sequels squandered for… honestly, I can’t think of any reason. And I don’t think Disney will ever say the sequels are non-canon and do what you mentioned at the end; at best, we’ll either start to go back to the High Republic era, or we’ll go far enough into the future that the sequels wouldn’t matter for the story - and the sequels would be canon, but never spoken of outside of maybe a reference here or there.