It bums me out that so many folks didn't have fun watching this movie. I only wish you could have seen it through my eyes (or the eyes of a kid, because all of them I've talked to enjoyed the heck out of it, too).
For me, as a space movie, it was fun. As a Star Wars movie, they completely missed the boat on the Force, which is kind of at the heart of the originals. We want to believe in something greater than ourselves, more powerful than ourselves, and we all want to be the hero in our own stories, and the original three episodes took us on that journey with Luke, Leia, Han, C-3PO, and R2-D2.
The Last Jedi had a lot of the right elements, but didn't feel like a bullseye in the SW universe. The Force Awakens felt like a rehash, but at least felt like a rehash with a sense of direction...there was BB-8, there was Rey dipping her toes into using the Force, there was an over-arching mysterious bad dude named Snoke (which I just realized is a pretty lame name, lol), etc.
A lot of us are sensitive to how Star Wars is presented because for many of us, it was our first entry into the world of nerds. We were into sci-fi & played with brooms as lightsabers & pretended we had the Force & grew up as geeks. We wanted the new movies to do justice to the old movies, and we already got burned by the prequels with Jar Jar Binks, that lame love story, etc.
There are a lot of good things about the new movies. The visuals are just incredible...mind-blowingly good CGI. Despite being overly-flippant in TLJ, I did end up enjoying the unexpected humor. It's just that TLJ didn't feel like it had that SW feel at its core. The heart was missing. A fun space movie, yes, a great Star Wars movie...nah.