SPOILER The lightsaber macguffin

Wondering if there's some illuminating bit of minutia that I'm missing here.

The Death Star plans were a macguffin, but it worked well because nothing stretched credulity in the context of the fictional setting of ANH. Lucas was drawing on WWII, a conflict which undoubtedly included real life dramas involving stolen plans/blueprints, etc. Not only is there no need to suspend disbelief, the "stolen Death Star plans" macguffin is intriguing enough to inspire its own movie (Rogue One).

Luke's lightsaber? Aside from the impossibly ludicrous visual of a lightsaber "tumbling through space," everything we know about its significance to the movie (to say nothing if its *existence* 30 years after being lost in ESB) is as believable as losing your wristwatch in a water park only to have it fall out of the sky into your son's driveway, half a world away, thirty years later.

There's a sequence of unlikely events that keeps this outcome constrained to the inviolable laws of physics (e.g., the watch went from person a to b to c to d, ended up on an airplane, fell out of the sky, etc), but you might as well kill off a main character halfway through the movie by having their head spontaneously explode (it would be just as believable).

Now, I know, I know. "The Force." That's probably what Maz et al. will pull out of their rear ends to explain it away. The lightsaber is like a lost puppy looking for its master. That would be fine, but as far as I'm aware, there's not one single example in anything that's ever been produced in the name of Star Wars (canon or no) that's ever established that inanimate objects like lightsabers have minds of their own and find their way back to their original owners.

I always thought lightsabers were just pieces of technology like...ya know, lightsabers. Unlike droids, there's no built-in AI (right?).

Is there some piece of information I'm missing about how the existence of this lightsaber (let alone how it got into space and ends up tumbling into an atmosphere) could ever plausibly be explained?

More importantly...
Why do the major players give a crap about this lightsaber?
Why would Kylo Ren and his troops go out of their way to some podunk planet just to obtain....some old laser sword...??? And why would Leia send Poe to retrieve it?? How could she (or anyone else) possibly know that it was Luke's without seeing it firsthand (and even then, I'm not sure Leia's memory would be that great about something she probably only ever saw glimpses of)? Surely there are countless lightsabers floating around in the galaxy, in the hands of collectors, etc (we're only decades away from the fall of the Jedi).

Death Star plans: Yes! There's a damned good reason to either risk your life or take someone else's (if you're Vader) for this.

Some old lightsaber?.... Makes no sense.

And then it turns out to somehow contain the coordinates to Luke's location....despite the fact that it was lost 30 years prior??? Huh?

BTW:
I'm aware that there's a Luke Bespin figure among the first TFA figs....which is just bizarre. I can't make any sense of the lightsaber stuff. Re-watch Ep 5! That lightsaber fell *into* the atmosphere of a gas giant! It's GONE!

It seems weird that nobody else seems to think this is weird, so I have the nagging feeling that I'm missing something...

 

Thank you kind sir, I'll take a look.

But man...."plothole"... Word, bro. Cuz I was thinking, like, might as well have Luke's hand spontaneously re-appear too and crawl around like Thing from the Addams Family because.....midichlorians!

 

No sir/ma'am, it does not. A *lot* of misreading going on with that article, apparently...

We already knew that Leia comes to be in possession of the lightsaber (Maz gingerly hands it to her in teaser 2) at some point in the movie. There's zero reason to think that it happens in any way other than what's been spelled out for many months now (ie on MSW).