Yup. Again, 2 minutes of expository dialogue could have given some depth and meaning to both the situation and the character. Cut the walrustits, add some more meaningful interaction between Luke and Rey and say something like "after the turn of Ben I started to doubt everything, so I came here where the Jedi started to find answers, looked at the ancient scrolls, went to that dark cave and came to the conclusion that I must not return and get involved, bladibla".
Also, I mightr have missed it coz I've only seen it once, but Luke cut himself off from the force, right? So how could he sense that Rey went to the dark cave instantly when they had their first lesson? Is it just a flip of a switch that he got the force back, or did he just let a little force in and then cut off again, or what...It would have been more interesting if Luke decides to help but haven't used the force so long that he actually needs to get back in business and while he helps Rey he learns new things about himself and the force too. You know, just a bit of character development...
Nobody threw a red herring, it was perfectly in context. Rose's (and thus the film's) message is "save the ones you love instead of killing the ones you hate". What I think of this message is irrelevant to present discussion. So what you were saying is that Holdo telling Poe the escape plan and Poe saying "this is a bad plan, I'm gonna whack them FO (kill the ones he hates) instead of packing up and fleeing (saving the ones he loves)" is silly and the way it played out in the movie is not silly?
But at that point all Luke said is that he's gonna face Ren and he can't bring him back. Not a word or a mention about the Resistance getting away. And at that point literally nobody knew about the back-door escape in the cave. All they knew that they are trapped and that Luke's going to face Ren. If Luke knew that there was an escape route why didn't he tell them? Luke bought them 3 minutes. So if Luke didn't turn up they would have seen the anime foxes running anyway and at that point it would not have made that massive a difference if there's 600 or 60 metres between the Falcon and the FO, as the walkers were already pretty darn far from the cave.
I haven't seen Brick but I'll check it out and I've only seen Looper once which I liked but thinking back there's a scene with Ryan Gosling and Bruce Willis in a cafe with Gosling acting as the audience surrogate asking questions about the timeline and stuff. Bruce Willis just says something like "look kid, we can sit and blabber on all day, but we won't find an explanation, the main thing is that we're here". At first I thought it was a clever ironic way of mocking time-travel movies. In hindsight it feels like a sarcastic comment masking bad screenwriting.