the right balance with these. They want the spin offs to have their own tone and style - but if there are crossover characters (and in this case a MAJOR crossover character) then it still needs to fit within the overall Star Wars story and not confessing other canon.

For example, in A New Hope, Han was shown to be a straight up scoundrel. A liar, cheater, who would kill you in cold blood if it helped him get ahead. His encounter with Luke, Kenobi, and then Leia in A New Hope ended up changing him. So in this film, he needs to be an anti-hero at best. While it's fine for there to be a comedic tone, he also can't be doing straight up slapstick.

But to your point, you'd think that those type of creative decisions would have been made long before they started shooting. I'm guessing KK wanted to make big changes during reshoots and they weren't going for that.