For fucks sake.
Lucas would give his people actual actionable challenges and goals.
Filoni just comes in says "Ok, do what you've been doing.... but do it BETTER!" and then goes and fucks a wolf plush.
Something like the Malevolence or the Darth Maul stuff would've never been done under Filoni.
For example, let's take TCW Maul, who for all intents and purposes, was their replacement for 2003 Grievous as the monster of the Clone Wars era. All Filoni did with him in Rebels was have him waddle about, making some shadowy plans here and there, which all amounted to nothing, before Kenobi bisected him a second time, which made little sense, since Kenobi lopped him in half last time and he survived. I'm sure a chest wound would've been something that he could recover from, given his Darth Sion-esque levels of survivability.
If it were me, I'd make it so that the Maul that Old Ben fought was just an illusion, while the real Maul, who created the illusion, stayed at a hotel in Mos Eisley meditating, having used advanced Dathomiri witchcraft to make the illusion. After his phantom gets bisected, he realizes Kenobi is too much for him and he leaves, to continue plotting against Palpatine, which is what he should be doing. In TCW, he got all the revenge he could possibly want on Kenobi, whereas it was the Emperor who murdered his brother and captured/humiliated him. So if anything, it should be the Emperor whom he seeks to destroy the most, and it would've made sense for him to bunk with Saw Gerrera or Luthen Rael and other radical Rebels who are more than willing to kill innocents for an advantage.
That is what should've happened, but that isn't what happened; instead, Maul dies like a pathetic failure after doing what amounts to jack shit and getting cut in half by an old geezer past his prime. The most we get is him killing Inquisitors, but they're basically your average mook Dark Jedi from games like KOTOR and Jedi Outcast, so he barely gets points for that.
In TCW, Lucas had him killing children, killing Jedi, gathering an army of criminals, overthrowing the Mandalorian leadership (the proper way, through trial by combat) and even getting revenge on his hated rival, Obi-Wan. The man had a vision, had his goals, had a plan to realize those goals, and even succeeded, in a way. If Palpatine didn't get mixed in, he would've walked off a success.
You can see how different Lucas handled a faction vs. how Filoni handled a faction. For example, Mandalore.
Lucas' Mandalore was a nation split in half, unsure of whether to embrace its warrior past or a more peaceful, prosperous future. They were split between well-meaning pacifists who still know how to fight, but are trying to mix in and be more civilized, and the ferocious Death Watch who preserved the Mandalorian fighting spirit in all its glory and savagery, basically the closest thing you'll get to the Mandalorians from the KOTOR games, which in my book, makes them better than the RepComm Mandalorians.
Filoni's Mandalore are standard goober goodie-goodie boy scouts in beskar, with none of the conviction of the pacifists nor the ferocity and strength of the Death Watch. If these fuckers had plastic armor instead of beskar, they'd be dead, five minutes flat. The Imperial viceroy even says as much, which goes to show that even the Empire knew the Mandalorians barely had an advantage over their troops.
Filoni's Mandalorians were too stupid to leave Mandalore, which led to the Empire bombing them back into the stone age, whereas Lucas' warrior Mandalorians, recognizing that the Jedi and the Pacifists would mount their heads on spikes if they stayed on Concordia, went on the move, building their forces far away from prying eyes, and only coming back to Mandalore when it was time to strike.
There's a certain logic to how Lucas does things, as opposed to how Filoni does things.
It was okay to subpar until Dave proved he had less T than the woman who wrote Harry Potter by inventing time travel to specifically ensure that a character he did not even make can survive since he doesn't understand character arcs. The wolf time anus is genuinely so deleterious to the setting it's not even funny. It, much like forcing a man who was bissected to live because costume design, were the heralds to death meaning fuck all in the setting.
It in my opinion is proof he hasn't evolved as a writer since Avatar: the Last Airbender, and in fact got worse at it since at least the characters in that show stayed mostly consistent in the one season he worked on for it.
Filoni could've just had it so the last remaining shred of humanity in Vader made him hesitate to deal the final blow and had him let Ahsoka go so long as the latter dropped out of the Rebellion, which would explain why she doesn't work as a Jedi until after Vader was dead.
Or you can have it so that Vader captures and tortures Ahsoka in a dungeon, but then he freezes her in carbonite and puts her on hold when Luke Skywalker started making waves, and that started taking up Vader's attention. Then have Luke fish her out of Vader's castle on Mustafar after Endor, since Anakin's ghost would tell him where to find his first recruit for his new Jedi Order.
Heck, they could even have some rocks fall on Vader's head and allow Ahsoka a window of opportunity to escape, which would've been simple. Since he's mostly armored, he can survive that.
Im actually going insane seeing people praise Rebels. I thought it was straight bad. But maybe that's just me? Thrawn was one of my favorite Star Wars characters so it could be bias from me just not liking how he was written in the show. I haven't watched it since it ended. I also admit I wasn't the target demographic for the show being like 17/18 when it ended.
People grew up with Rebels as kids, and now those kids are growing up. But looking back at Rebels, it was at least decent, which is more than I can say for most of the stuff kids see nowadays. It was at least serviceable, which in kids' media these days, translates to "amazing".
