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Looking back, I think it's VERY CLEAR at this point that the world was saved by Lucas simply not having the SFX at his finger tips he eventually did while making the original series. While he and his team certainly pushed the boundaries of FX to make the first trilogy, they did so in a way that not only felt believable (no CGI with actors dealing with tennis balls on sticks or giants green screen warehouses instead of sets) but ended up creating what we all came to know WAS the Star Wars universe. When Lucas then went back to "fix" the old ones and then re-shoot the new ones with the new tech, he removed so much of what literally MADE the movies special. So much of them simply didn't look at all like, well...Star Wars.

Sure, there were issues with some things in TFA, but the truth of the matter is I never really cared, because the giant smile on my face from sitting there and being taken back to being 7 years old and sitting in the theater watching Star Wars made up for it completely. JJ, with all his faults, made a damn Star Wars movie, and none of the trilogies were...and that will always fall on the shoulders of one George Lucas for not really comprehending what he created or why fans found them special.

Well said. I've seen so many people respond to this with "oh you just want nostalgia." You just don't get it if your immediate defense is the nostalgia argument. It was never about nostalgia. It's about film being a visual medium, and Lucas created a very visually specific universe with the OT. The prequels looked so different that it doesn't even feel like the same universe. This is the same problem I had with the Hobbit. Part of being successful with a Star Wars movie is being able to bring us back to the Star Wars universe. TFA did that. Everything looked and felt as if this was a continuation of the story but still set in the same universe. It felt like Star Wars again. And the other part to that is the characters. We actually had characters with personality that didn't sound like mindless wooden drones form the prequel era.