You said it, Chewie!

What are you talking about, he invents these things after being kidnapped and tortured by terrorists. While a piece of metal is near the point of entering his heart due to getting caught in an explosion. (And every subsequent movie introduces new challenges he has to work to overcome before moving on too) how in the fuck is that not hard work?

But beyond that: The problem people have with Rey isn't that she is a prodigy, (Luke was too) it's that she never puts any work into it in TFA (tony stark works very hard in the cave, then spends a good chunk of every subsequent movie building and tinkering on his suits to make them better) but STILL is better than the existing, established cast even at the things they were previously specialized in.

Rey being instantly talented with a lightsaber is one thing. - Her being better than people actually properly trained at it? ehh, questionable but still fine.

Her instantly knowing how to use the force without training despite everyone else needing to be trained in how to use it (including both Luke and Anakin, who were literal children of the Force) - That is a bit of another thing.

Her knowing all of the above AND how to pilot the Millennium Falcon, a busted down and then repeatedly patched-up junker that Han has been flying for most of his life BETTER than Han, who we already saw doing so in the previous movies? - That is bad character creation.

See, that's the thing about it: Characters can be special, and characters can be powerful, but if they start to overshadow the rest of the cast it starts being bad character design.

Tony Stark is not a badly designed character, in spite of the fact that he can learn, design, and build things at a rate few fictional characters can match, because he exists in a superhero setting, and everyone around him is powerful enough that he needs that advantage just to stay competitive.

Tony Stark being really smart doesn't do anything to undermine Thor being cool, because for as strong as Iron Man can be his powers are different from Thor's, and they will be valuable in different situations. (Iron Man: Ragnarok would be a very different movie).

We see the same pattern in the OT as well. Han is a smuggler and he has a smugglers abilities, Luke and Obi-wan specifically do not have those abilities, hence why they have to hire him in the first place.

Leia is an established resistance member with the skills associated with that, which are important since Luke, Han, and (to a degree) Obi-Wan are not familiar with how the Rebellion actually works at the start of the trilogy.

Obi-wan is a Jedi Master, and his skills with the Force and the Lightsaber are unmatched among the heroes at the start, but he has also been stuck on a backwater planet for decades, lacks a lot of the social skills and connections that Han and Leia have, and is elderly. (Even with that though, he is too powerful to be maintained long-term without overshadowing Lukes development, hence why he was killed off).

Luke. Luke is an extremely talented Jedi, but at the start of the story? at the start of the story Luke isn't shit. He is a dumbass farm-boy who has no idea how to hold a lightsaber or use the force at all. - Being a prodigy doesn't make him an instant master, it makes him learn things quicker. Compressing what would have been a lifetime of learning down to a few months rather than a few decades. BUT that was with the benefit of two of the greatest masters of all time training him, AND he was not ready. Luke basically gets his ass handed to him by Vader when he tries to confront him the first time, an even in the final confrontation (when he has been practicing for a lot longer and is more experience) he STILL would have died had it not been for Vader intervening between him and Palpatine.

Yes, if we take the Tony quote at face value he DID become an instant master at Thermonuclear Astrophysics, but that really doesn't matter since it has zero bearing on the plot (as far as I know, that line is the only time such is ever referenced), and even if it had it would have slotted in with his existing skill set as The Engineer.

Han randomly pulling out the ability to lockpick a door would be in a similar category. Even if we had never seen him do it, it's within the same conceptual space as his other skills and doesn't stomp on any other characters toes so it would be unlikely to garner a negative reaction.

But the way they present Rey doesn't give the audience the feeling that she should know this, at the start of the movie (and forever, thanks to the backstory from TLJ) Rey is presented as a Scavenger with no connection to the Jedi, she should not have those skills and she has not done any work to achieve them. (Unlike Tony and Han, both of whom dedicated their entire life to learning and maintaining skills relevant to their field before the story even started) If the writers want her to have those skills all they would need to do is throw in some dialogue explaining that she used to practice with Swords as a child or something and BOOM, less of a problem with lightsabers - If they want her to know the Falcon better than Han (which I really don't understand why they do) have her be the one tasked with repairing it or something, and show that to the audience - If you want force powers, have her trained in the force.

But the fact is we get none of that. Her skills come out of thin air, with no effort or backstory related to them at all, which they might have been able to get away with if they were all in the same general archetype and related to her character -someone having the skills of a Jedi Knight, especially with a mystery past, is fine. Obi-wan was basically that exact thing- But if you are writing a characters backstory that doesn't logically lead to them having a certain skillset, and you are unwilling to give the person any sort of training in those skills, they should not have them.

And if you give them those skills regardless, and make them better than even the previously established characters, then people are going to view it as a Mary Sue that you just want to feel powerful without having to put in the screen-time to do it properly.

This is somewhat the fault of The Last Jedi though, since TFA specifically left her backstory ambiguous, leaving the possibility that she was trained in some way, but we know for a fact now that she wasn't. Making her inexplicable abilities nothing but Author Fiat.

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