ST Starkiller Base actually wasn't a failure, and shows how the First Order learned from the past

I've seen a lot of criticism of Starkiller Base, and how building "another Death Star" shows the First Order learned nothing from the Empire's failures.

But if you actually look at how Starkiller Base is designed and used, I don't think this is accurate at all.

Consider what it takes to destroy Starkiller Base. First, one of the galaxy's best pilot has to take an insane risk in jumping right into the planet's atmosphere to bypass its shields. Then they have to infiltrate a heavily armed facility, relying on intelligence from a defector who worked there to navigate it and find the key officer who has the codes to disable the shield, and threaten her into doing so. That was what it took for the Resistance to even begin to be able to attack the base.

Even at that point the actual "weak point" was so well-defended that it then held up just fine even under continuous bombardment from X-Wings. It took having that crack team of infiltrators then sneak even deeper into the base and trigger another massive explosion from inside, just for the X-Wings to have a chance of doing damage.

And at that point, it took another ridiculously skilled ace making a trench run to actually destroy it.

Fundamentally, any machine harnessing that much energy is going to have "weak points" in the sense that it will need mechanisms to contain and use all that energy. But it is simply untrue to claim the First Order learned nothing from the Empire's failures in terms of actually protecting the "weak point" on their superweapon.

Of course, some people criticize them for even building a superweapon in the first place....but I think this too is proven misguided.

The First Order has a fairly potent military, but in comparison to the Republic (rather than the Resistance) it is not in nearly the position of dominance that the Empire held over the Rebellion. If the First Order was to begin a conventional military attack and violate the longstanding "truce" with the Republic, there is every reason to believe that the Republic would be able to muster the forces to effectively respond and if not thwart the effort entirely, then make it incredibly tough on the First Order.

What is needed then is some way to make an overwhelmingly devastating initial strike. To somehow annihilate the entire Republic political, military and economic leadership, along with their fleet, in one strike. In Cold War terms, they need to get rid of the "mutual" part of "mutually assured destruction".

Enter Starkiller Base. Its built to accomplish exactly this, and completely succeeds. Like the Death Star, it only gets one shot before being destroyed. Unlike the Death Star, that shot doesn't take out some meaningless, explicitly pacifist planet of sentimental value to a certain princess...it takes out the entire leadership and majority of the fleet of the First Order's primary rival in the galaxy, along with multiple heavily populated worlds of Republic citizens.

Even factoring in Starkiller's destruction, The First Order come out way ahead on this investment. They traded the cost of terraforming one world into a superweapon, along with nearly all the forces on said superweapon (apart from the few who evacuated...aka all the most important First Order leaders on the base). In return, they took out the Republic's most important system and basically annihilated their existing leadership and military infrastructure.

Of course the First Order would have loved to have Starkiller Base stick around to do even more damage and crush the Resistance. But even so, it was far from a complete failure, nor did it failure really occur because of some catastrophic design flaw on their part.

Ultimately, Starkiller Base was designed with significantly better defenses on its vulnerabilities than the Death Star, and also took out a vastly more important target before its destruction. Far from being some huge failing of the First Order, its a pretty good example of them learning from the past.