Yup, it's a war, people die, I do get that. But it's also a fun morality tale set in space.

Okay, I understand that the prequel trilogy involved pretty much everyone dying or left in abject misery, but that was predetermined from the start. The original trilogy only had two major good guy character deaths - the old man who (briefly) acted as a mentor to the aspiring young Jedi and had a complicated history with the bad guy, and the short wise alien. The former death has obviously already been emulated in TFA (and I would prefer they don't emulate the second by killing Maz, but I guess we'll see). Ultimately, the original trilogy is an uplifting story of good triumphing over evil, and it doesn't require a lot of grim-and-gritty everyone-dies drama to do that.

If by the end of the new sequel trilogy all of the original trio had been killed off and a third of the new trio too, I'd call that shock value. It doesn't fit the tone of the series, and the way TFA was such a shout-out to ANH makes it seem clear they're trying hard to recapture that tone.