The Romulan Republic wrote: What does that have to do with the new lead being female? Unless you're actually trying to argue that the reason Rey was weak is because she was female, I'm not sure what your point is.
Anyway, I personally think your take on Rey is a little too harsh. I found her personality likeable enough and have no complaints about the actor. I just think she wasn't very well developed. Sloppy script and shallow characterization.
The sloppy script and shallow characterizations were the main problems, yes. But I feel, as some others probably feel, that Rey not being challenged in TFA had a lot to do with their desire to show her being a "strong female protagonist." Furiousa, Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor are good protagonists: they have a hard time, they accomplish something through their perseverance in the face of all odds; they don't always succeed and they very often fail. I didn't feel that at all with Rey: she just sleepwalks through the film with complete ease, never being challenged, never making any decisions or doing anything on her own initiative.
She has a mastery in every single field of expertise, gunfighting, staff fighting, the force; she's mastered a number of languages including wookie and droid (I mention again no other character speaks droid, because I am convinced that humans 'cannot' understand droid) and the only explanation for these feats being throw away lines in 3rd party merchandise. She isn't shown to have a mentor: she isn't shown to have been taught 'or' raised; with the environment she was shown growing up with I'm surprised she can even read. And despite all this she's the new character who comes along and instantly outshines the established cast in every way. She's a fanfic character.
Even Neo from the Matrix, one of the biggest wish fulfillment Stu's out there, had a hard time. He was basically the load for most of that movie; impotent while Cypher tried to kill him, impotent while Morpheus sacrificed himself, chickening out and getting captured by the agents when trying to escape that office building; failing the jump test. He was challenged and he grew, at least in the first film. I feel like if they wrote Neo the same way they wrote Rey he would have succeeded with flying colors, and without any effort, in all of those instances. It's basic storytelling: the character should fail and should learn from their failures, or struggle and learn from their struggles. Scenes should exist in a movie for a reason, preferably even to tell a story; not just to pad the run time between the big dumb fight at the beginning and the big dumb fight at the end.
Was Rey as brain-breakingly bad a character as Anakin in TPM? I'd say not quite. Anakin destroys the droid army, as well as doing other impossible feats, while having no idea what was going on. Even as a little kid when I first saw that movie, 7 years old, Anakin completely took me out of the film every second he was on screen, more so while accomplishing ridiculous feats with no sense of difficulty or danger; without even being aware he was doing so. That whole movie was like the part with the goblin king in the Hobbit 1, or the barrel rider scene in Hobbit 2: a cg laser lightshow of shapes moving around on screen that makes your eyes glaze over, with no ties to logic, reality, or suspension of disbelief.