I've seen the movie twice now and, what can I say: I felt the need to post about it on the Internet because [-]I have learned nothing since the Usenet days[/-] I am sure you will all find my unique perspective enlightening and life changing.
And that? That snarky sentence I just wrote up there? That's everything wrong with The Last Jedi: too much Internet style snark. Coupled with some unbelievably bad writing which is honestly shocking for a major studio production.
Consider the ending of The Force Awakens. Rey spends about half an hour climbing a mountain and then the camera swirls around her and Luke for another ten minutes while she holds out the lightsaber. OK, it's only a few minutes, but still: precious MINUTES of running time. You don't squander that on a nothing scene, right?
We get a compressed version of that scene in TLJ to remind us where we left off, Luke takes the saber, and... tosses it over his shoulder?
NO! No, no, no. This is HORRIBLE. This is like someone being a deliberate dick during an improv routine and deliberately nullifying something that a previous performer established. You wouldn't do this in Second City, you wouldn't do it in in a role-playing game, and you sure as hell shouldn't do it in a major motion picture.
Do you want Luke to refuse to teach Rey (at first) for reasons? Sure, that's fine. He can refuse the lightsaber, with words, or by reluctantly taking it and then giving it back, or something. Anything other than the petulant Internet snark.gif style way of throwing it over his shoulder like it doesn't matter. Remember, this was the saber that Mazz had in a mysterious box in the previous film, the saber that Kylo Ren demanded from Finn, the saber that Rey used to defeat Kylo after Finn failed to do so. THIS IS AN IMPORTANT SABER.
It's not a joke prop that Luke can just toss over his shoulder. (The only thing missing from this scene to make it a perfect 4chan meme is the 'whoops' sound effect from a Benny Hill skit.)
In less than a second, it establishes that Luke wants nothing to do with the lightsaber, nothing to do with Rey, and that something is deeply and badly wrong with him. That scene wasn't bad writing, it was the opposite. It was a shocking distillation of what would take a few minutes of dialog to establish, and not as strongly.
Yes, it would be a dick move in improv, because the rules of improv are to not invalidate what someone else has introduced, but this isn't improv, and instead of invalidating (the lightsaber is still an important character after all), it uses a shock move to introduce an entire theme without taking lots of time to explain it. It was instantly understandable and sets the stage nicely for the antagonistic behavior of Luke in the following scenes.
But let's back up to the actual first scene of the movie, the incredibly gripping... two unnamed Rebel flunkies discussing munitions during the evacuation. Are you FREAKING kidding me? You could have opened with anything you wanted to, and you chose THIS? My goodness. Please find a better opening scene than this first draft nonsense.
Also, in your next draft, please cut this entire terrible waste of a casino planet section. It's a fractal of bad writing. You waste a scene with Mazz telling you only one hacker can do the job, you waste a scene with that hacker at a craps table, and then another hacker who can also do the job just happens to be in the next cell? Oh, and he also kept his hacking gear when he escaped? I mean, what the HELL? This is awful, introducing extraneous new characters for no reason, on an extraneous side-quest that accomplishes nothing other than to pad the already bloated running time.
The Canto Bight scenes are critical for Finn's character arc -- they're where he learns a number of important lessons: winging it doesn't work and there's more out there to fight for. It also introduces the very interesting plot twist about war racketeers being behind everything for profit, which I hope they pay off in IX.
I agree it's the weakest part of the movie, but it's still important and totally not a waste of time. It pays off at the end of the movie. And the 'pick up the guy you just found' puts paid to a decided trope when that goes about as horribly wrong as it can.
You seem to confuse the deliberate trope flipping as bad writing because it doesn't adhere to the tropes.
Others have already picked on the bad jokey lines like 'holding for Hux' or 'page turners'. I'll pile on -- that scene with Poe and Hux is going to age terribly. Again, this isn't an Internet skit about bad cell phone reception, this is STAR WARS! Poe could've found any way to stall Hux. He could've used a Star Wars-y insult like 'nerf herder', he could have pretended to negotiate surrender, he could have given a rousing Rebel speech. Instead we get conference call jokes and at the end, a 'yo momma' joke. Really? REALLY?! Who wrote this, a 16-year-old?
Valid. They didn't bother me, but I can see how others might not like the style.
Allow me to offer up another line that, to me, proves we're looking at a first draft.
Snoke welcomes Kylo Ren and Rey to the throne room.
Snoke: "My faith in you in restored, my good and faithful apprentice."
See those bolded words? (faith / faithful) Repeating the same word in different forms is a common 'rough draft' thing that you fix when editing. You don't leave those words repeated like that; it weakens the setence. (OK, yes, in rare cases you can repeat words for poetic effect but this random Snoke line is not at that level.)
Psychological reinforcement. This is moments before Ren betrays Snoke, so the hamfisted double reinforcement is there for a reason -- not because it's a 1st draft. They're selling the point that Snoke now has faith in his apprentice. It could have been less in your face, sure, but that's a stylistic quibble, not a failure of writing. Audiences today seem to need to be punched in the face to get the point.
Although, it's interesting that your complaints are about the punches to the face to reinforce a point because they were punches lacking artistry, but you still seem to have missed the point.
How about this one when Rose meets Finn.
Rose: "I'm doing talking to a Rebellion hero! Ugh, 'doing talking', what am I saying?" (paraphrased)
This is another classic sign of 'rough draft' writing: when a character calls out the bad writing directly! This is the writer's unconscious telling him, 'Hey, this sentence sucks. Please fix it so you don't sound stupid.' But he LEFT IT IN! This is terrible. This line wouldn't have made it out of the slush pile at Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and it should NEVER have made it into the production script of a movie.
I'm going to stop here because this is making me depressed. I wanted to like this movie, and I did like parts of it, but geez. Please hire a good writer. Please.
Or, it's how real people really speak when suddenly confronted with their heroes after a tragedy. Good grief, do you really want the character crying over her recently dead sister, being chased by the Order, and who just meets unexpectedly one of her heroes to have perfect diction? That was an awesome humanizing point for Rose.
You seem to be heavily hung up on the basic style of writing, like someone that's taken some courses and been taught the "right" way to do a thing that you can't see that real writers pay lip service to those things but do their best work when they change it up, like writing characters with understandably bad diction or upending expected tropes to set scenes. The things you're complaining about are like the Pirate Code -- more like guidelines than rules.
. 
