The last Jedi felt like multiple ideas or movies stapled together.
The whole find the code breaker stuff was fun and also completely out of place, and how they got there even more so. It seemed like they back tracked from that story to the chase story as how they got there was very linear. Like they didn't even question so much of their speculation, it was just, 'oh they must be using active tracking' > 'We can't blow up the lead ship as all their other ships obviously have this unheard of tracking tech as well' > 'We must break the shield code!' > 'There's one person who can do it and we must go get them!' > 'This small shuttle can do it, no we won't take anyone else to safety.
I half expected the screen to flash "Mission: Find the code breaker" as if in a video game. Not to mention the number of times they held camera on the secret beacon for Ray it seemed like they were either trying to suggest they could be following the beacon or that at one point they were going to have them follow the beacon but decided against it.
Which is all to say the transition to get them onto the rich casino planet was amazingly forced and it caused the whole sequence to need to deliver extra big just to get the audience to forget how they ended up there. That they ended up bringing back someone who would be partially responsible for killing a good chunk of the rebelion was both expected and a good payoff/punishment for their secretive deeds. Let's hope that in the third one the main characters have learned from and been tempered by the deaths of these red-shirts.