PLOT: Taking place in a future impacted by a war between the human race and the forces of artificial intelligence, the film's plot follows an ex-special forces agent who is recruited to hunt down and kill the Creator, who has developed a mysterious weapon with the power to end the war by destroying mankind itself.
It's also pretty damning to the franchise that all of the directors were already established--or like Gareth Edwards and Rian Johnson, are up-and-comers--who are generally seen as being better than the Star Wars films they were involved with.
Clearly the problem was not just the directors. The whole approach was fundamentally broken.