I didn't grow up with Star Wars - saw A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back probably somewhere around the time of Episode II in the early 2000s. Somehow never got around to Return of the Jedi.

So a couple months ago I was looking for something to watch on Netflix, came across RotJ and figured I should give it a shot. After something like half an hour of pointless and remarkably silly action scenes involving mostly obnoxious characters (all the stuff with Jabba the Hutt, Leia's infamous outfit, you know the drill), I gave up, switched to a re-watch of Episode VII, and had far more fun.

Now I'm not denying that Episodes IV and V, and for all I know VI in its later stages, do have genuinely great moments, and obviously the original trilogy wrote movie history in terms of special effects and technical innovation. But yeah, I'd say nostalgia does play a big role in how negative people are about the later movies compared to the original trilogy (leaving aside for a moment the Jar-Jar factor).

Rogue One was certainly a good and entertaining action movie, which I enjoyed far more than that first half hour of RotJ, but it was a one-off with all the main characters dying at the end, designed to fill a well-defined lacuna in the original trilogy's main story, thus explaining the remarkable lack of character development and the limited exposition. TFA is the first in a trilogy - it's inevitable that it has to spend significant amounts of time building up characters and plotlines in order to make the events of later movies resonate more.

So I don't really think it makes sense to blame episode VII for not being more like Rogue One, nor to expect that VIII will be, apart maybe from the dialogue aspect which I can't say I noticed myself.