Agreed on all counts. Huge Jacked Man was iconic as Wolverine, Ryan Reynolds was/is the same as Deadpool, and Robert Downey Jr. was the perfect casting choice for Iron Man. Even Chris Evans, as big an SJW and Lefty idiot as he can be, is very, very good as Captain America.

I doubt we'll see those roles recast anytime soon – and if they are, then the movie franchises themselves will suffer badly in the process.

Of course, that doesn't mean that other DC/MCU roles can't be recast. Superman, Batman, the Flash, and Green Lantern are all available in the DCU – I'd especially like to see Batman done properly now that BatBale is definitively finished. And on the MCU side, well, there have already been 4 different actors playing the Hulk, and only Mark Ruffalo's portrayal came to be seen as "definitive" in any way, so plenty of room there.

The one thing that concerns me is the trend toward recasting all of these roles with "diverse" characters. It won't be long before some purple-haired idiot of indeterminate gender identity tries to make Batman a disabled black Muslim tranny.

Yours is as good a theory as any. Back in the days before the SWEU post-Endor canon was shoved face-first into a woodchipper, that's actually more or less how events transpired. Supposedly Emperor Palpatine boinked one of his many Hands, a woman by the name of Roganda Ismaren, and she conceived his child, Irek, but this all got retconned out and reworked and so on.

(Don't ask me how I know so much of this crap.)

So it's a perfectly plausible explanation with plenty of precedent in pre-existing canon. And, alliteration aside, I've seen far stupider ideas (like, say, the entire plot of The Last Jedi) treated with respect.

The problem is that this raises almost as many questions as it answers. And this is in no way the fault of your quite plausible theory.

It is entirely the fault of the sheer stupidity of the scriptwriters who created one huge set of contradictions throughout the canon, starting with TFA, then on through TLJ, and now into ROS.

For instance – when did Palpatine father a child? How is it possible that Force-sensitivity skipped over the child and went to the grandchild instead? Why is it that Palpatine's extreme evil did not manifest in Rey before, given that we have clear examples in the canon of evil descending in lineal fashion? How did Palpatine find out about his long-lost grandchild if he was sitting around twirling his mechanical claw for 40 years after Endor?

And so on and so forth.

It's basically one big snarled-up ball of stupid, created by overpaid untalented Hollyweird hacks who had absolutely no idea what the Hell they were doing.

I think Palpaitine impregnated an intern while he was Supreme Chancellor (and before he force-lightninged his face into a diseased nut-sack.)

The result was one of the "nobodies" that spawned Rey…