So anyway, a while back somebody posted a thread here about like
an amalgamation of "leaked" script details that were strung together to form a hypothesized plot synopsis for The Force Awakens.
Surprisingly, it's like... ridiculously accurate for the first half of the movie. Actually, pretty much scene for scene it describes exactly what happens in the movie. (This was posted back in May... 7 months ago.) The one major exception is that the MacGuffin in the synopsis is not a map to find Luke Skywalker (which doesn't really make any sense anyway), but rather is Luke's lightsabre itself. Although it's unclear why everyone is after the lightsaber, presumably it's because a force user would be able to use it to "find" Luke via visions or something, or perhaps there was supposed to be digitally encoded information about Luke's whereabouts. Either way, it makes about as much sense as what actually happened in the film with the "map". (Why do they even need a map? Why not just coordinates?)
Anyway, as I said, apart from the MacGuffin, the synopsis is pretty accurate, scene for scene. That is, until the second half of the movie. At that point, it departs from what appeared in the final product significantly. The details in the synopsis may reflect an earlier draft of the script, or simply inaccurate information on the part of the people who "leaked" these details. I'm inclined to believe it was from an actual earlier draft, given that the first half is pretty much dead-on accurate. If so, it reveals a lot about the thought process here, and what the writers (Kasdan, et. al) were going for or thinking about.
Firstly, the absurd similarity to the Death Star assault in Ep 4 and 6 is totally gone. There's still a First Order base on some snowy planet, but it seems to be some kind of Gothic Castle. And there's a superweapon involved, but it doesn't blow up any planets - the exact nature of what it does is unclear, other than being able to blow up Maz Kanata's castle. (That's another thing, in the earlier version Maz Kanata's castle is on the same planet as the Resistance Base, and that planet is... sigh... Yavin 4.) The final battle is also not a rip-off of the Death Star assault, but instead it seems to be a full fleet vs. fleet attack in orbit above the snowy planet. Also, Princess Leia has a significantly expanded role as the general in charge of the assault. In this version, the Resistance also has some kind of superweapon, but they're unable to use it because the First Order successfully destroys it somehow. However, all the stuff with Han, Kylo Ren and Rey seems to be there... Han goes down to the First Order "base" (which is now like a Gothic Castle instead) to plant bombs, where he meets Kylo Ren, who kills him. Then Ren duels with Rey and Finn in the forest, where Rey beats him, as happened in the actual movie.
So... it looks to me like earlier drafts called for a much different ending battle, but most of the other details were the same. This explains why the "assault on Death Star 3" element of the actual movie felt so rushed and shoehorned in, I think... it likely wasn't part of the script until much later drafts. I would guess that what happened was that the writers were told they needed to edit their ending battle to make it more "Star Wars"-y by meddling Disney executives (or maybe by Abrams), so they ultimately just rewrote it so that it was basically a retread of ANH/ROTJ, and also upped the stakes by changing the super-weapon to something more powerful than the Death Star.
That said, the earlier draft final battle doesn't seem particularly great either, but that may simply be a result of the synopsis not doing it justice (in particular, the details of the First Order's superweapon, and exactly what it even does, is unclear.) Another interesting thing is that the earlier draft doesn't seem to have any urgency or immediate impetus for having the Resistance launch their attack on the First Order base. Rather, they just do it as a matter of course, because like, they're at war, I guess. It's not in reaction to some ticking clock where the First Order is about to blow up the whole Resistance planet. I can imagine that some executive didn't like that, and insisted there needed to be more urgency to the Rebel attack.
So, long story short, it looks like they had all the plot details ironed out a while back, which is why the first half of the movie, and the bits with Han/Kylo Ren/Rey, felt very well thought out and invested with emotion, whereas the assault on "Death Star 3" was just a rushed last-minute writing job shoe-horned in to make the movie more like the original Star Wars. At least, that's my hypothesis here.
