Actually, that makes perfect sense to me. I might be influenced a bit too much by the novelization of RotS, but on the other hand, that just happened to play right into my understanding/interpretation of the Dark/Light conflict in the Force. It's not, and never really should be about numbers, about stacking up Jedi to defend against Darksiders (one thing the prequels seem to have done is kill the EU practice of referring to all Force users as 'Jedi' and thus Darksiders as 'Dark Jedi'; I like the notion that 'Jedi' is just the order, rather than the practice of the Force itself), like, say, Aes Sedai against Dreadlords or Black Ajah. The how and why you do something with the Force matters much more than your power, which is how one Sith lord, with the occasional help from various dupes managed to take down the entire Jedi order - he had purity and devotion, whereas they had become political. Not politicians, but tied to the state and its institutions and apparatus. Rather than be guided by the Force and their consciences, they were fighting in service to a military agenda and priorities (which is also why I loathed Karin Traviss' books, since she seems to think that military ideology superior, that the Jedi erred in not going far enough into the military mentality). They had become generals, and a general is really just a bureaucrat. I'd even go so far as to say that obi Wan might have survived, because he never really swallowed that. He wasn't actually leading the clones who tried to kill him, unlike Ki-Adi-Mundi & Ayla Secura and the guys in the speeders and fighters. He never liked doing any of the military stuff, like flying a fighter or using a blaster, and fought independently of his support troops. He was still pure, and that was just enough margin of connection with the Force to let it save him.

Anyway, back to the topic of Luke & Ben Solo (interestingly, in the EU, it's Luke who has a son named Ben, but Han & Leia's son still turns to the Dark Side, though he revives the Sith), the loss of Ben (and presumably the death of his other students, which I seem to recall the movie implying, if not stating outright) is more than just a numbers thing, it's the worst nightmare come to pass. He's experiencing Obi-Wan's failure, at least as Obi-Wan confesses it to him. We saw RotS and before that, AotC & tPM, and know it was Annikin's fault, and the fault in teaching him at all, if there was any, was in Qui-Gonn's part, though I'm not convinced of that, either. It was Annikin's own flaws and faults that cause his fall. But LUKE doesn't know that. He knows what Obi-Wan told him...that Obi-Wan was not as good a teacher as Yoda, his own instructor, and because of his arrogant presumption to train Annikin himself, his pupil turned to the Dark Side. And then when Luke's pupil turns, who is the son of his oldest surviving friends no less, and his nephew to boot, what could possibly be a worse outcome? That's got to be worse than not trying at all. At that point, keeping the hell out of anything remotely like this seems to be the only sane choice, lest he repeat the error he seems to have inherited from his mentor, and continue to provide the galaxy's aspiring tyrants with henchmen. That could also explain why he is not pitching in himself. While we don't know what happened in the interim, in confrontations with the Dark Side, Luke Skywalker is pretty much Oh-for-two. On a secular (for lack of a better term) scorecard, he's 1-0-1 at worst, since he survived Bespin and escaped to fight another day, and was the only one to walk away from his encounter with Vader and the Emperor, but in both cases, Luke made grave, un-Jedi-like errors. First, he rushed off prematurely to face Vader, accomplished nothing, was too late to save Han, couldn't reach Leia & Chewie (and she ended up first trying to warn him off, and later coming back to rescue him), got mutilated and almost ended up at Vader's mercy, and maybe facing the Force equivalent of 13x13 conversion. Yoda and Obi-Wan tried to warn him off, and later confirmed the wrongness of his choices, saying that it was unfortunate that his connection to Vader was revealed before he was sufficiently grounded and trained in order to keep that connection from messing with him. And it does. It clouds Luke's thinking, and their kinship dominates his judgement and choices, causing him to, for all intents and purposes, bet the success of the rebellion on what might be the wishful thinking notion of some good left in Vader. That he was right and succeeded had more to do with Vader than Luke himself, since Luke lost control and tried to strike down the Emperor out of emotion, whether fear or hatred or anger, and then succumbed to Vader's manipulations and seemed to be on the verge of giving in to the Dark Side, perhaps even calling upon it to defeat Vader. There was none of the detachment or serenity we see in other crises Luke survives with the Force, such as Jabba or the Ewok banquet. In his two confrontations with the Dark Side, he came close to succumbing to it, and in his efforts to teach, got a bunch of kids killed and gave the Dark Side a new champion. From Luke's perspective, he's the worst thing that could happen to the good guys in any war with the Dark Side of the Force. It could be argued that he did not even contribute to the defeat of the Empire, as there is no obvious way he affected the outcome of the Battle of Endor, unless one assumes he prevented the Sith lords from averting the Empire's defeat. And if he was lured into a near fall through rage over a threat to a sister he had met less than five years ago, and by his feelings over a father whose face he had never seen, how much more fraught must any confrontation be with a nephew he had held as a baby, and watched grow up, whose parents are his closest friends in the world, who entrusted their child's well-being to him, and he let them all down.

One reason I was not sorry to see the EU declared non-canon, was the prequels kind of ruined those books for me. For the most part, they were sci-fi, techno-thriller, military adventure books, especially the ones I enjoyed the most, but if you looked at it the way I did, the prequels combined with the OT totally gave the lie to that perspective of the Star Wars setting. It was always all about the Jedi and the Sith, about virtue versus power. The Clone War was not even a real war, it was a hideous atrocity, with the same player behind both sides of the board, and the Republic and Jedi and Separatists lost because they all played. The military stuff did not matter at all. Subtract Jedi from the equation, and the rebels die on Yavin. They got their butts whupped at Hoth, and Endor was a trap they fell into, except for a bunch of factors that are appallingly sappy when you think about them for half a second - they made friends with the Ewoks, and Luke refused against all reason, to give up on his father. Yoda was right all along, wars do NOT make one great. Once the whole saga was out there, the EU novels, many of which I enjoyed at the time of their release, felt kind of hollow, and not just because Timothy Zahn's notions about the Clone Wars were so divergent from the films, but rather because all those pastiche authors and their readers were all suckered into looking at the wrong thing. Even books about the new Jedi were treating the Force like a weapon or tool to be put in the service of those wars and battles, which turned out to be in complete opposition to the message of the actual movies.

With that in mind, under the "wrong" vision of Star Wars, that governed the EU, Luke in tFA is slacking or sulking, and depriving the home team of a critical asset, but not fighting the New Order, or not training more Jedi. But from the other point of view, nothing in Star Wars has ever really been decided on a battlefield. All Luke knew was that he had failed yet again, and it was best to remove himself until he could see a way to actually help, or else let the good people try to get something done right in whatever ways they can. Again, this is not a struggle won by military derring-do, that the Resistance survived at all, was because Finn strove to do the right thing in the only way he could think, because Poe made a connection with him, and because Han Solo is the most sentimental guy in the galaxy, first hunting down the ship he loved, then taking in two kids who in a lot of ways bring to mind his younger days and his old friends, then reconnecting with his ex, and finally, to never stop reaching out to save his son. Just because he seems to have failed, does not mean it wasn't important, and that he did not serve some sort of object lesson or inspiration to Rey.

You don't beat the Dark Side of the Force with tactics, or firepower, or skill. You don't beat it with politics or for revenge. You beat it with love. That's why the Jedi lost the Republic, because they didn't have anything to love, except impersonal institutions, like the Republic or the Order. Maybe Qui-Gonn got that, and maybe Yoda came to understand it, but I doubt the rest of them did. Obi-Wan definitely seemed to by aNH, and that's why Luke succeeded to the degree that he did, in spite of his own personal failings and missteps. Annikin, on the other hand, was not actin out of love with his obsessive infatuation with Padme. As Yoda told Luke, it's important to value what your loved ones are trying to achieve, maybe more than you value their presence in your life. If Annikin had loved Padme in a positive way, he could never have betrayed her cause and especially not to keep her like a possession he could not do without.

That's what I hope Abrams & co get right in depicting the downfall of the New Order and the Knights of Ren. It doesn't matter so much if Ben gets redeemed (and he seemed to be deliberately putting himself beyond that with his killing of Han, suggesting that he gets what the Light side of the Force is all about, and was deliberately burning that bridge), but Rey & Finn have to win the right way for this to be true to Star Wars.