outright contradict the other films when you have crossover characters. I don't even think that KK was trying to have this film match the tone because they wouldn't have even brought in Lord and Miller. But you gotta have the characters making sense.

For example it's perfectly fine for the MCU films to have their own tone based on the vision of the directors. But you can't have Tony Stark in Spiderman Homecoming and him having a completely different personality from Tony Stark in other MCU films. That's a character thing not tone.

Rogue One is a bit of a unique case though. With that movie you have no major characters who were crossover, so they had flexibility to build their personalities however they wanted. The exception is on the villain side with Vader and Tarkin, and both of them definitely matched their characters from other films. (I know some people hated Vader's choke joke, I think it fits though.) So with Rogue One they didn't have to worry about the main characters fitting a certain tone at all. But what they DID have to worry about is the story not creating plot issues with the original trilogy since the plot of the film leads right into A New Hope. They also wanted to be sure that the end of the film did match the tone of A New Hope so you could watch the films back to back and have it make sense. So they did things like incorporating more of the John Williams SW themes at the end, being sure that the Tantive IV was an exact match for what was seen in ANH, making the graphics on the Death Star plans match what was seen in ANH, etc.