Haha, so much does come down to how we each react to things. I'm not trying to overwrite anyone else's reactions, but we definitely had vastly different reactions to Rafa's story! I mean, yes, I know what Filoni probably wanted me to take away from it, but what I saw was a story from a very hurt young woman but the events were:
Luminara making a point to go back just to talk to Rafa and check on her, that Luminara is a Jedi, not a social worker, what was she supposed to do? Be a Jedi and all of the rest of the government's support system, too? Was she supposed to be a Republic child services agent? Was she supposed to be Coruscant's housing relief aid? And saying "the Force will be with you" isn't a meaningless platitude coming from a Jedi in Star Wars, it's one of the most central well-wishes and treated as something said with respect! I don't blame Rafa for her reaction, she was in a terrible place and she's a young girl who deserves all the sympathy in the world. But even in her story, what I heard was a Jedi going back to check in on her after she had a to make a horrible choice, and not being all things to all people, that she couldn't magically fix Rafa's problems.
And with Ahsoka, even she says that she's not being fair in her accusations, like what are they supposed to do? Drop the trillions of people in danger on Coruscant when Dooku and Grievous were attacking the heart of the Republic, to go wage yet another war on Mandalore? Those lives on Coruscant don't matter? They were fighting in the war because the Separatists weren't just fighting for independence, they were carpet bombing civilian homes, they were setting up slave empires again, they were using biochemical warfare experiments on planets, they had to be stopped. Joining in the war at all is to be drawn into politics, even as hard as they work to say, no, it's your job to govern (like they do with Riyo Chuchi when she wants the Jedi to negotiate for her, Obi-Wan says, senator, it's you who must lead your people) and it's the people's job to hold leaders accountable (this is what Ahsoka teaches to the cadets on Mandalore) and they do their best with that, like how many times do we see them pushing for anything from Palpatine, only for Yoda to be turned down and go, "Well, that went about as well as usual." or for Mace to desperately try to save the Zillo beast and get railroaded or for Shaak to try to get Fives to the Jedi only to be run right over?
And what dogma are they relying on, that's not like "don't kill unarmed people" or "the dark side is bad"? What will of the Force are they not following and what scenes are we talking about that show the Force isn't being listened to? Attack of the Clones makes a point that the Jedi can't perceive things as clearly as they once could because the Force itself has been darkened by everything in the galaxy, which isn't something the Jedi did, so I don't think it's fair to blame them for the lights in the galaxy going out when they've been doing the same things they've always been doing, you know?
(Qui-Gon didn't join the Council because he wanted to focus on his relationship with the Force, which is admirable in many ways, but he had a chance to enact some of the changes he wanted in the Jedi Order, to have more sway about seeing those changes happen, and turned it down because he didn't want to give up teaching Obi-Wan and wanted to focus on his own thing. Which, fair enough, but I don't think it's particularly "best Jedi ever" to say, no, I could help out with the things I wanted done, but I'm gonna leave that to you guys and go do whatever I want instead. 😂 I'm being tongue in cheek about that, obviously, but.)
And I'm not saying the Jedi were perfect, they were drawn into a situation where more people had lost faith in them and they were fighting in a horrible war, but that's because everyone would die if they didn't (Lucas' words, even!) and they were expected to be All Things To Everyone in the galaxy, they were held up as this idea of how they should be able to fix everything, even things that were completely not their role at all, and when they couldn't magically end the war, people blamed it on them because they were the ones trying to fight it, instead of the galaxy itself doing much of anything. As Obi-Wan says in TCW, "If the rest of the galaxy stood up in this war, it would have been over long ago."
You're possibly right about what the point of Headland's ideas are, but my counterpoint is: I think she's wrong about the actual content of the movies and the actions of the Jedi, what people say about them versus what they themselves actually do. They were in a no-win position, that's the dilemma ("Are they going to stick with their moral rules and all be killed, which makes it irrelevant, or do they help save the Republic?" --George Lucas), that what they were supposed to be was corrupted by being drafted into the war, being forced to be soldiers instead of peacekeepers, but that the alternative was worse, and they were still doing their best in a galaxy that wasn't providing any other paths out of there, because they were never going to just let people die.
Their entire reason for everything they did was still compassion for people, even as they were dying by the dozens and there just weren't enough Jedi left to do more than barely hold the line in the war that would have killed so, so many more without them. Any politics they do aren't for their own gain, it's for the gain of others, and when I look around our own world and how "political" everything has become, I think maybe everyone in the galaxy should be more political, because people are politics.
