Originally Posted by
eschatological
I feel like A) you don't know how the military works at all in a combat situation,
B) you especially don't know how military intelligence works,
and
C) you're forgetting the situation set up in the movie: that the First Order had somehow tracked the fleet through hyperspace, and Holdo didn't know if she had a rat on board with a transponder or something, and had to compartmentalize information.
Even without C), though, sensitive operation parameters are ALWAYS need-to-know, and a fighter pilot who isn't currently strapped in (IE, the Fleet wasn't engaging with X wings, of which Poe was a pilot) doesn't need-to-know. The movie clearly sets up that the command structure knew the plan, because they were there when she was fueling up the transports, and well, it was on a giant screen, and they were obviously okay with it. If the plan had involved X Wings being used as a distraction or something, or to engage in a last ditch effort, and she didn't tell Poe - then yes, that'd be unjustifiably stupid.
Poe was just disobeying orders and being exactly what she accused him of being: a trigger happy fly boy. Reckless, and dangerous.
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The beam laser wasn't weak. It one shot the door. But the ground invasion just never happened. It never got to that. Luke went out and Kylo Ren stopped everything to try and kill Luke. All the cannon did was open and warm up, which is why Finn just didn't instantly disintegrate when he entered the beam it was emitting. But guess what, when it actually fired, the door just exploded.
RJ didn't set up their doom and then relieve the tension of it. What he did was have Poe make the (right) decision to flee, with the information he had - which didn't include Luke showing up. The point is they needed the extra time, and they needed Poe's leadership in the bunker, instead of him dying pointlessly in the battle. Ironically, the laser one shots the door, and the doom is averted not by anything actual done by the Resistance, but by Kylo's impotent rage, and his need to utterly destroy Luke when the door was wide open and gaping and ready for the FO to wipe out the Resistance. And that whole sideshow of Kylo devolving and falling into his rage gave the Resistance the little bit of extra time they needed to escape. The right choice was to flee, and try and survive another day. And it's not illogical to assume there's a way out of an unmapped cave system.
All I'm asking is people actually pay attention to what happened in the movie. Which the vast majority of its critics didn't seem to do.
Edit: As for Poe "needing" to destroy the Dreadnaught....no. The plan, as agreed upon, was to jump to hyperspace and flee, but Poe felt the need to destroy the Dreadnaught cause it was too big a trophy for him to pass up. If they couldn't trace through hyperspace, again, that plan would have worked, and the bombers would have been intact and fine. They obviously didn't know that they could be tracked, but they had the best plan for what they knew. He only "saved" them inadvertently, by complete fucking accident, because had the Dreadnaught come out on the other side of the hyperspace jump, it would have been able to easily destroy the fleet, unlike the other ships.