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human
[star wars] Are the Sith just massively incompetent?

The history of the Sith as I understand it:

* Spend a few thousand years murdering each other on some backward planet
* Get their ass handed to them by the Jedi and co repeatedly 
* The one intelligent Sith ever realises they're been really bloody stupid and runs away
* The Sith spend the next few thousand years being utterly irrelevant and almost extinct, yet still so short sighted they regularly murder each other.(apparently Sith don't believe in retaining institutional information or survival)
* A guy called Plagus starts working on a plan for galactic conquest after murdering his only source of information.
* Palpatine becomes his apprentice after hearing a wonderful story about living for ever. Then murders him without even learning the supposed secret
* After thousands of years of being blowhard failures Palpatine leads the Sith to victory
* Thirty years later Palpatine gets murdered by his apprentice because apparently genius level Sith planners and seers think having an angry robot guy with a lasersword around while you try murdering his son is a good idea. A guy who you know full well you turned on the basis of protecting his family. Sith empire immediately collapses.
* Thirty years later the Sith idea of competence is a guy who has (grand)daddy and anger issues who literally couldn't beat a complete novice to save his life and had to relie on luck after systemically failing at every task given him and accidentally awakening the force in some desert scavenger. His sugar daddy is so pleased by this turn of events he decides to actually bother to finish training him.

That's 30 years of success after 1000s of years of being bloody stupid.
gpt
**WALL OF TEXT INCOMING**

The problems the Sith face are inherent to the dark side, which is at its core unstable and turbulent. Each individual dark-side user is compelled to increase their own personal power as much as they possibly can, regardless of any and all other factors. This is accomplished in two ways: by seeking out and hoarding as much knowledge of the Force as one can get one's hands on, and by destroying any person or thing that even remotely resembles a threat to the expansion of one's power. 

The Sith constantly get their ass handed to them by the Jedi because they perceive their own colleagues as a greater threat than the other side. Two Sith Lords saw the massive flaw in this approach, Lord Kaan and Darth Bane. Kaan tried to resolve it by promoting equality among the Sith, which failed because the dark side is opposed to equality by its very nature. Bane successfully resolved it by limiting the number of Sith to two, a master and an apprentice.

Plagueis sought to sidestep the problem entirely by becoming immortal. A limitless lifespan would mean limitless power, as there would come a point in which he accumulated so much knowledge of the Force and temporal power that nobody could ever destroy him. His mistake was trying to bring Palpatine in on the plan. Palpatine realized that once his master had obtained immortality he would have no need for an apprentice, since the purpose of Bane's reforms was for each apprentice to overthrow their master and become a stronger Sith Lord. 

This is why Palpatine murdered him without learning the secret of immortality, because he had to make his move BEFORE Plagueis himself obtained that secret or it would be too late. Palpatine then attempted to do exactly what Plagueis did but without making the mistake of trying to get Vader on board with it. 

Indeed, the reason Palpatine tried so hard to get Luke to kill Vader was to get rid of a powerful and experienced Sith who was fully intending to eventually overthrow him, and replace him with a yokel from Tatooine who was trained in the Force for all of fifteen minutes by two elderly has-beens who hadn't so much as picked up a lightsaber in decades. Luke posed precisely zero threat to him, which was proven when Palpatine promptly handed him his ass after he refused to do the deed and was only killed when Vader took pity on his hapless offspring and sucker-punched his master by throwing him down a reactor shaft.  

The Empire collapsed because Palpatine was running the same game Plagueis was, which didn't require any plans for continuity of government because the emperor would be immortal. The plan only failed because he didn't anticipate Vader's last minute change of heart. 

This unfortunately led to Kylo Ren, whose complete and utter incompetence as a Sith can be attributed to his upbringing. As Han and Leia's kid, living a pampered life in the New Republic they built, he has no real darkness to draw upon. Nobody's wronged him, he has no long-standing enemies, his family never mistreated him, he isn't living under the boot of an oppressive government, etc. All he's got in terms of a dark-side connection is a family history and run-of-the-mill teenage angst.  As for his total lack of common sense, well, he's just a dumbass.