One area that I'd like to know more about is Palpatine "surviving" DS2. My personal feeling is his body died, but he was able to transfer his consciousness to a waiting clone.
I am hoping the novelization gets in to this a bit more.
I went looking for the novel on Amazon and was surprised to see that it doesn't get released until March. I guess I'll have to wait...
I'm thinking something like that, too. Case in point? Snoke. The first few minutes of the movie make it clear that Snoke was a creation of Palpatine and his cabal. And Snoke looked like he was one of the only viable creations of that process. The others that were in the tanks looked like either a work in progress or failures.
I'm also thinking that this storyline links in with some other subplots throughout the saga: the children of the Force, as seen in Clone Wars, where Darth Sidious was trying to gather Force sensitive children; the Inquisitors during the age of the Empire, who sought out Force sensitives, either to hunt them down and eliminate them or put them to use for Imperial purposes; and the Child in The Mandalorian, who the Client was looking to harvest genetic material from him in that show. Is the process of cloning a Force sensitive individual possible? That seems like a question worth discussing.
Originally, I thought that perhaps Palpatine had opened a portal to the World between Worlds as seen in Rebels. But if he had done that, wouldn't he have been able to stage a more immediate return? And his appearance would have remained much the same as we saw him in ROTJ. But the Palpatine we saw at the beginning of the movie looked like he had not suffered the facial deformities caused by Mace Windu re-directing his Force lightning back at him during their fight in ROTS. This Palpatine appeared to be blind, needed to be suspended from that crane looking device, and had deformed fingers. I have to think that Palpatine was able to transfer his consciousness from his old body to a somewhat incomplete clone body, much like he planned to pass his spirit onto Rey once she performed the sacrifice on Exogol.