TFA seemed great on first watch
The Force Awakens was an okay movie. I think if it had been followed up by two incredible sequels then it would be considered a worthy part of the canon... but I never found it greatin itself. I remember talking to a couple of casual SW fans in work afterwards and they couldn't get their heads round why I found it so lazy and underwhelming. I don't think you could make a more 'Star Wars by numbers' movie without going into the world of parody, except this time the whole thing feels like it's designed by commitee (a common sin with modern day big budget projects) rather than the original being the vision of one filmmaker.
I naturally rail against anything that makes the Star Wars setting feel smaller, and TFA made it feels positively tiny. Everything was just the same, a generation on. Rogue One gets brickbats from some quarters for including 'fan service' things from the original trilogy, but that just matches the setting. Here, the First Order are just the Empire still, in every conceivable way. They have fascist uniforms, fly around in Star Destroyers and TIE Fighters and deploy Stormtroopers and Walkers. The Resistance are even worse, just a slightly reskinned Rebel Alliance. And personally, the worst thing of all was JJ's inability to comprehend how space works (also on display in Star Trek) gave me the impression the whole thing was taking place in a small box or snow globe.
The major crimes of the sequel trilogy take place in the second and third installments, but there's so little of interest about how the Force Awakens kicked the whole thing off in the first place.