I'm not even going to talk about the sequels first - because those had SOOOOOOOOOO many problems that went beyond just the writing and the characters both new and old.

But for example if you look at Mandalorian and Book of Boba Fett. Mandalorian is GREAT when using new characters and telling new stories. Even when it uses existing characters, it's great when they are using rarely seen smaller characters in stories. Where it started to go off track IMO is in the second season bringing in SO many legacy characters. Same thing in the entire premise of Book of Boba.

Going back to the sequels though - beyond the fact that they had no idea what they were doing with the overall story and wasted what should/could have been GREAT new characters (and going back to Force Awakens, they WERE great characters except for the mystery box crap) those films also had the issue of balancing time between the legacy characters and those new characters. They wanted to give enough time to get to know the new characters, and to do that felt they had to explain why the old characters weren't on screen as much. And that combined with not knowing where they were going with Rey, Finn, or Poe, it was disaster.

Contrast that with this - Tony Gilroy has already scripted the story of Andor covering 5 years leading right up to Rogue One. So everything is planned out - and there could be all kinds of foreshadowing going on now that isn't paid off until way down the line.

Absolutely agree regarding going away from "names". As soon as this was over I said out loud "who the EFF directed this?!?!?!?!?" the name Susana White popped up on the screen, I had no idea who she was. So then I looked up the rest of the directors:

https://www.starwarsnewsnet.com/2022/07/andor-season-one-writers-directors.html
Toby Haynes directed episodes 1, 2, 3, 8, 9, and 10.
Susanna White directed episodes 4, 5, and 6.
Benjamin Caron directed episodes 7, 11, and 12.

As I mentioned several posts up - Gilroy has this show split into four three episode arcs. And there's a director handling eash of the three episodes in their arcs, with Toby Haynes doing two of the four arcs. Genius. And none of these directors are "names".