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@pursuewisdom If memory serves me, we had some different perspectives, but I’ll tag @brandonmiller and @gabriellepollack for their direct thoughts.

I wouldn’t call Ray a Mary Sue because she flaws and fails at points. Her parentage is regularly a weakness of hers in TFA and TLJ, and she’s easily manipulated by Ren & Snoke. In TFA, she also lost the first battle with Ren, and only won the second because of his injury. She’s more powerful in TLJ, but she did get some training with Luke (about as much as Luke did with Yoda; perhaps more depending on how you get around the timeline issues in Empire). So while I don’t see her as a strong character, I don’t think she’s weak enough as a character to be a Mary Sue.

Hard for me to say about Johnson’s motivations. I do think he wants to be original and subvert audience expectations; whether or not he intentionally meant it as a recurrence of his “destroy the past” theme is hard to say, but I think you could make a good argument for that being part of the movie’s point!