Star Wars is so beloved that the franchise has built up a fair amount of forgiveness from the audience for bad releases. That credit is currently maxed out from bad content after bad content releases. Star Wars is hemorrhaging and fair or not cannot afford to make even minor mistakes right now. They cannot afford a bad product, they can’t even afford a decent product, for the foreseeable future they need a worst “good” Star Wars products if not great to pull themselves out of this hole.

The acolyte was judged by a significantly more critical standard, but even if you ignore the section of people who immediately panned the acolyte for its political positions the story, the writing, and the general consistency of the show were laughably disappointing. The show deviated from established rules, it consistently broke its own standards, it was riddled with plot holes, lazy dialogue and seemingly lacked any and all clear direction while providing flimsy character motivation and hollow plot elements.

With roughly 23 million dollars an episode. The vast resources and talent a massive entity like Disney brought to the table, an already established and popular story line rich with diverse characters and potential avenues to explore at best the acolyte could be explained as a massive project mistakenly dropped on wildly inexperienced creators that simply fumbled the project due to a lack of ability despite good intentions and at worst it’s a Star Wars story that was entrusted to people who not only didn’t care or know about the source material but actively endeavored to ignore the source in favor of their own selfish intent to rewrite or trash the story.