I agree with your last point there, while they have connections, they don’t tell the same story. There’s no real arc for the franchise.
The balance thing was odd. I mean Palpatine survived being thrown into a reactor and the Death Star 2.0 being vaporized. Surely the master planner had a contingency plan here, especially since he can apparently switch bodies. And he wasn’t exactly a strict follower of the Rule of Two, so he likely had more apprentices being groomed. But if he didn’t, the death of all the Jedi didn’t stop Luke and Leia from force ghosting it up later, so we have to assume at a minimum that Darth Bane is still doing his thing on Moraband. And there are still plenty of force sensitive people out there, including a Palpatine. Some of those people are going to figure the force out and some will naturally be drawn to either side again. Not much has changed from the end of Return of the Jedi.
