Well, Carrie Fisher is at least to blame for doing all of the cocaine before that scene, which certainly didn’t help her with the terrible dialogue she’d been given.
As I said, on paper this is correct, but in George’s head, who knows?
What’s in George’s head has been rewritten, over-written, degaussed, then rewritten again so often the data is hopelessly corrupt.
I get this feeling that most viewers have not seen or barely know about the first three movies because they are too young, and given that the producers decided to reboot the franchise by borrowing heavily from the first movies and redo them with the latest, e.g., the desert planet waif, a Death Star, etc.
I think similar took place for the other franchises, like Mad Max (compresses the first movie in a short flashback and then basically repeats the second), Alien (lands, explores, gets infected, etc., and characters with attire, hairdos, and names resembling that of Ripley and Dallas, like Tennessee; borrowing from the blue collar and space trucker/grunt ethos of the earlier films by bringing in some 20th-century pop music), Star Trek.
It’s like a sequel/prequel but also a reboot, such that one can watch the new films without having seen the old ones.
‘Vader’ means father in Dutch.
There you go. Why let facts get in the way of a good story. 
Regardless of how young, kids who watch Star Wars watch all the Star Wars -es. They don’t skip the original trilogy. They are all marketed together anyway. And to the kids today, the prequels are no less ancient than the originals.
NONE of my students started with The Phantom Menace. I polled them, they all started with A New Hope. Then Empire and Return. I told them to tell their parents that someone raised them right.
Some stopped at that point, some went IV,V,VI then I, II and III. Some watched IV, V, VI then VII, VIII, IX and then went back.
Now it’d get complicated with my nephews watching IV, V, VI, Rogue One, then Phantom Menace (but, oops, trade wars are boring, skip to Clone Wars and Droids), Solo and the Mandolorian and Obi-Won. Then just consume everything new, even Andor.
Ever try Machete Order?
IV, V, II, III, VI.
(Of course, that list was made before the Disney sequels.)
The only exception to Machete Order is that my kids would say “Skip Phantom Menace… except for the fight with Darth Maul. He’s a badass.”
Didn’t someone actually do a cut of the prequels that didn’t suck?
Darth Maul had great fight scenes, true. But badassedness is a character trait. And he didn’t have any of those.
His entire set of dialog consists of, what, growling twice?
He says “at last we will have our revenge.” What the revenge is for is never explained.
The badass fight at the end of Phantom Menace is like watching the floor gymnastics event during the Olympics. It’s athletically impressive but it doesn’t really mean anything dramatically; there aren’t any emotional stakes. It’s not even clear WHY the fight is happening; we don’t really know what Darth Maul’s problem is, and the fight has no tactical connection to the overall conflict taking place at the end of the movie. It just happens because there is a requirement that there be a light saber battle.
Hot take: Obi-Wan Kenobi may have been the only person left standing (and as far as we knew at the time, the only person left alive) at the end of the Episode I lightsaber duel, but with the death of Qui-Gon Jinn, the Jedi lost the Duel of the Fates. Qui-Gon was the only person who could have possibly trained Anakin and kept him on the straight and narrow. Obi-Wan, great Jedi though he was, failed Anakin.
I just hope if Disney starts retconning movies away …they don’t end up in a very confusing situation with multiple sequel timelines like the Halloween and Terminator franchises,
This seems like a distinct possibility. If comic books have taught me anything, it’s that whenever a story, character, or timeline is officially declared to have “never happened”–eventually, a new writer and/or editor will come along and decide that as a matter of fact, they really did happen after all.
There will be no retconning.
Daisy Ridley to return as Rey in new Star Wars movie
Of course given Lucasfilm’s current track record of failed Star Wars movie projects I’ll believe it when I see it.
Of course, given Lucasfilm’s current track record of SW movies, I might not even watch it.
Just like Animal Farm and whose idea the windmill was.
Is she enough of a compelling and exciting character to warrant another three movies?
She was OK but really no more than that. Seems like a tough sell to me.
Better than Poe! Or Rose.
But, yeah, not another three movies!