I don't think that was intentional, but Johnson and Abrams have such different styles and artistic ideas and personalities that giving them different movies wasn't smart - they'd have been better off picking one director for all three movies, or at least making someone a sort of "showrunner" for all three movies (which they did not do). Abrams took stuff personally (very clear from interviews) that for Johnson is part of being an artist working on a project other people work on, which is why the third movie went in such a weird direction with a lot of characters (kind of funny Abrams did this and was so bitter, but also explains a lot about some of the tension behind the scenes with Lost and so on).
But the original plan was going to be a car crash of a different kind - Trevorrow is an objectively much worse director than either Abrams or Johnson (Johnson by far the most talented of the three as a director, love him or loathe him, but Abrams is at least solid - Trevorrow isn't even that), and holy hell anyone who thinks his movie would have been good should read his script treatment, or better yet, let Jenny Nicholson go through it for you:
Would it have been worse than TROS? Hmmmm... hard to say. Equally bad? Probably, just in different ways.