Benjamin Olson
Hero
The shame of it is that Palpatine cheating death could have been a great payoff for the never really resolved Darth Plagueis's powers over life and death plotline from Revenge of the Sith. Yeah, trotting out the same old villain when he should be very dead is lame, but not having the overarching villain of the saga in the final trilogy is also lame.Apparently not, because somehow Palpatine returned.
But they would have needed to establish that he was still alive in one of the prior installments of the sequel trilogy, which would have required actual multi-film planning for those movies, which nobody thought was important for some reason.

