Right? I felt like it was so heavy-handed. There were so many small references in there to A New Hope, seems like they were trying to cater to viewers who were

Right? I felt like it was so heavy-handed. There were so many small references in there to A New Hope, seems like they were trying to cater to viewers who were pretty familiar with the original movies already anyway. Ending with the shot of Vader watching them fly off or something similar would have been better imo. Edit: to be clear I'm operating off of the assumption that they did that so it was impossible to miss the fact that A New Hope picks up directly after the end of this movie