Well, of course they are. The secret orders of wizards always have to give up mundane things to attain cosmic understanding. It’s a trope that goes back so far it predates the invention of writing. But for some strange reason everybody keeps trying to fit Star Wars into a perpetually-ironic post-modern culture mold where everything is taken a little self-conscious; it was pretty strongly embedded in mythic storytelling from the beginning.
From a basic story perspective, the movie has two cardinal sins. I say two because there are two more-or-less disconnected plot lines. Fundamentally, there’s no story reason why the Luke/Rey/Kylo story needs to overlap with the Poe/Finn/Hux story, and it shows.
The Rey problem is that she’s the single least interesting character in the series, and maybe the least interesting main character in the entire movie series. She’s emotionally flat, blatantly can’t do passable movie fighting but wins through the power of bad writing, and winds up checking off the entire Mary Sue list by the end. Just to top it off, the movie manages to include a scene where she creates her own existence is the literary sense. perhaps worst of all, she’s still narratively void and is basically only useful as a foil so Kylo Ren can be fun. She literally adds nothing whatsoever in either of the two movies she’s in.
Don’t believe me? Stop for a moment and imagine she was just removed entirely. Nothing needs to be changed. Every single thing of interest was done by someone else. Finn is the one with the drive to escape the random sand planet and flies off. Poe leads to charge to destroy the Death-Star-knockoff. Han has the clever plan to get inside. Then, in the new one, ultimately Rey doesn’t do anything and even fails to convince Luke to help. Kylo Ren kills Snoke. Poe and Finn battle the First Order. She does less to further the plot than BB-8.
Anyway, it’s not her parentage that’s the issue, but rather than the movie can’t actually allow vulnerability to actually be a worthwhile character flaw. It in no way informs her actions* or represents anything for her to overcome (literally appearing for ne scene in each movie and then being ignored). This is contrast to Luke, whose implicit hero-worship of his mysterious father was a background element which caused him to try living up to his father’s supposed heroism, and made him emotionally vulnerable to having his illusions broken. He received a difficult lesson during his own experience in the Dark Side cave, one which he presumably didn’t understand until Return of the Jedi, when he finally outgrew the flaw while representing the basic virtue in a more mature way.
*To clarify, some would argue that it was holding her back in the Force Awakens, except it wasn’t. Sure, there wasn’t anything on the desert rock keeping her there, but she also had no motivation to leave, no destination in mind, and nothing to propel her forward.
The flipside is the other half of that plot with all the rebel guys. The upside is that ther are no boring characters in this half of the plot (frankly, this should have been the entire movie). THe downside is that essentially nothing happens in this entire stretch of film. The stakes are ostensibly high, but the problem is that the filmmakers failed to give us any context. But that’s a whole series of posts to go over the bad writing there and I don’t want to spend the time.