Wasn't it confirmed somewhere that the Knights of Ren were a splinter-group from Luke's student base lead by Kylo? Although that raises the question of where the fuck they were during TFA.
His coming off as so weak imo just comes down to narrative necessity - they needed a way for Rey to survive the duel at the end of the movie, anything after that is just justification after the fact. If anything, he should have been at the peak of his power after finally going all the way dark side when he killed Han.
Star Wars is very volatile and has undergone so much retconning and has the entire EU completely expunged
This is what it boils down to - the primary narrative comes first, everything else is build around that. Same way that lore takes a backseat to gameplay in video games. And I don't know much about film business, but I get the impression that these days it's a lot more decisions by committee and a lot less one or two dudes sitting around putting shit together, so some weirdness is obviously going to turn in. Best approach is to just chill out.
Was George really THAT far gone?
Given how the rest of the prequel's worked out, I think the answer is probably 'yes, yes he was."
re: jar jar, the
whole drunken boxing thing just seems like another element taken from old kung fu movies, doesn't necessarily imply anything about sith potential. See
Drunken Master - Wikipedia Drunken Master II - Wikipedia
It is an early e
xample of the comedic kung fugenre for which Jackie Chan became famous. The film popularised the Zui Quan (醉拳, "drunken fist") fighting style.
Anyway, even if it was confirmed that Jar Jar was originally intended to be an undercover sith, I'm honestly glad they changed it, because I can't imagine any way they could have executed that that wouldn't have been retarded. Jar Jar was just too goofy - Yoda was weird and cooky, yes, but he wasn't the butt of every lame joke in a 2 hour movie. You can't bring a character back from that.
It's also implied that Yoda was putting on an act to test Luke by appearing undercover (another classic kung fu trope), at least to a large degree. I don't think his weird behavior in his first 5 minutes of screen time (which is where 90% of it occurs) is really comparable to Jar Jar's 2 hours of painful absurdity.
I don't doubt that if Lucas had tried to implement a big reveal with Jar Jar as a sith lord, everybody would have fucking hated it, because he would have executed it as atrociously as he did everything else in those movies. People are just infatuated with the idea now because it's something to talk about that makes the prequels seem maybe a tiny bit less lame, and that's the current mood around SW right now with the optimism brought on by TFA.
IMO the reality was probably somewhere in the middle - no crazy "Jar Jar is a secret sith lord" conspiracy, just that Lucas probably planned to have Jar Jar play a much greater role in the political storyline in Attack/Revenge, being used as a puppet by Palpatine to manipulate characters and political events, but then trimmed that shit after everyone loathed Jar Jar.