For a while I thought I'd be disappointed not having any Jedi in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, but as the story unfolded it struck me that it was actually better. Not having them around stripped away a lot of the fantasy needed to make a war movie work. But it turns out there was one character who very nearly was a Jedi, and it's not who you think. Co-writer Chris Weitz tells Yahoo! Movies...
"For a long time in the story, there were Jedi around, even if only in the background," he reveals. "Jyn’s mother was a Jedi...We thought that it would be more interesting to have a story without Force powers, without lightsabers. We could explore a period of broken faith, a galaxy without hope. There’s despair because the Jedi are gone – and with them, for many, even the memory of the Force. That meant our story could be about normal people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps."
A good idea if you ask me, although it would have helped clarify why Lyra was carrying around a Kyber crystal to give Jyn. It may also explain why Galen Erso wanted to get as far away from the Empire as possible since they were slaughtering all Jedi by that point.
