Thanks JD.
It absolutely DOES confirm what many of us thought, that JJ didn't have a clue where he was going with this story and effectively just rushed it out to meet a deadline. No wonder it feels like a remake of ANH for much of it.
I think they really dropped the ball there. Rian mentions having not outline or anything for the next movie either, basically just let the next director do what they want with the story. I really think someone should have taken the time to at least come up with some kind of overall unified plot for the series and let the individual movies fill in the small details. I know the original series at least had some kind of outline. Details of course changed along the way as needed, but there was a general direction for where it was going. This sounds like an "Exquisite Corpse" like result https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse