Going to watch an Star Wars movie is a move based on hope
Unlike most of the other SW movies, it's not an interpersonal melodrama, but rather an almost by-the-numbers "rogue ragtag commando team comes together and defies the odds" adventure, which is a genre I find more suitable to my tastes.
It's also the first movie that shows the Rebellion behaving with some degree of competence in guerrilla warfare skills. Mind you, the fact that they have a significant fleet without political control of any major planet (as far as I know) is incredibly impressive. But it didn't seem like a fleet capable of winning the war on its own (never mind their erratic and emotional strategic decision-making process); this is the first movie that feels like it's depicting a rebellion, with the lights and shadows involved, in addition to a civil war.
I suspect the move from 3CPO and R2D2 to K-2 to fill the funny robot slot says something about how the target audience has changed over time (not the new ones, but rather how the old ones have grown and changed in tastes). In any case, I liked it quite a bit, and I suspect most people did/will.
And a final retraction: I described elsewhere Cassian Andor (before seeing the movie) as "the shareware version of Han Solo," but I was wrong. Han can charm, con, bluff, and pilot circles around Andor any day of the week - heck, Han Solo has a claim to being the current archetype of that sort of thing - but he wouldn't last a day against him if it came to war.