Your take on the Rose Quartz reveal in your most recent post is well-reasoned, fascinating, and unsupported by the *completed* show. That's the problem with trying to discuss a show one has dropped. If anything, the way the show and characters view her only gets *more* complicated from there, and it's not uncritical of its own implications. In particular, Pearl's relationship with her own past with Pink Diamond is fleshed out in a way that addresses your key complaint (especially in the movie).
I see you're not a longtime reader of the blog. Otherwise you'd know that Steven Universe "losing" me doesn't mean I dropped the show. It means I stopped caring about what happened. I am fully aware of how Steven Universe Future invents new character flaws for Pink Diamond that complicate the characters' relationships. I just don't care about any of it. I concede that they clearly tried to do some fixing up, but the results weren’t that successful in my opinion.
As such, I’ll clarify that this issue isn't as simple as "make it more complicated and it's automatically better". I was pointing out specific concerns that weren't addressed with enough complexity in the original show, and they don't get addressed in Future either.
To repeat, these issues are:
Do the Crystal Gems really love Rose Quartz or is that their programming making them follow Pink Diamond?
The show treats Pearl’s tenure as a Crystal Gem as liberating and her relationship with Rose Quartz as positively romantic, when, in actuality, Pearl had no agency as a Crystal Gem, because Rose Quartz was still Pink Diamond, her slave owner who knew Pearl was geassed to obey her when she used her to fake her own death, which happened way past Pearl joining the Crystal Gems.
The Crystal Gems were a sham. Their role model, the Renegade Pearl, took all her marching orders from a Diamond, knowingly. The conflict also wasn’t a rebellion, because their leader was a Diamond, one of the ruling class. It was not about the underdogs proving their worth, it was about a god-queen staging an elaborate scheme to run away from home. No one points this out.
The reveal that Pink Diamond abandoned Spinel, had anger issues, was physically abusive to Pink Pearl and did a bunch of other messed up stuff does not address any of these issues. It just makes the character relationships more complicated in a different way. That's not enough. It's not enough to just make things more complicated when the problem was that the original complications weren't handled with enough nuance.
Furthermore, Pearl saying that the abused Pink Pearl "still has it bad" for Pink Diamond is not Pearl reconsidering her relationship to Rose, it’s just more idealization of Pink Diamond's relationship with her literal brainwashed slaves. "Have it bad" is what you say about someone who's in love, not someone who's been brainwashed to worship someone else. Also, the episode ends with the Pearls "understanding"/forgiving Pink, so the writers actually made it even worse instead of fixing it. They had a chance to make Pearl see that Rose was her slave owner, but instead the message of the episode was: "Rose was better with our Pearl because at least she didn't physically abuse her and that means she changed for the better and she's totally redeemed."
Rose Quartz should have been a separate character from Pink Diamond who committed regicide if she was meant to be a morally gray character instead of a full-blown villain. There's no way to view someone who kept a slave while pretending to be trying to liberate slaves as anything other than black morality. The "rebellion" was staged to preserve Earth, not free the Gem species. Even in the show, the Crystal Gems are all: "we have to protect Earth because that's what Rose Quartz wanted!", while Bismuth is the only one who wanted to free gemkind from the Diamonds' tyranny. Despite this, no one points out how the Crystal Gems rebellion was never a rebellion, it was a scam pulled by Pink Diamond, who had saving a strange planet as her primary concern, while not caring about saving her own people at all.
This is especially grating because the potential to tackle it is there. The Crystal Gems built monuments to honor the great Rose Quartz, much like how the Homeworld Gems built monuments to the Diamond Authority. Rose Quartz was treated like a Diamond without the people who did the worshipping knowing she was a Diamond. And yet, once the truth comes out, no one questions whether or not their feelings for her were a part of the "worship your Diamond" programming all Gems come with, especially Pearl, who knew Rose was her Diamond. No, instead we get: "[Pink Pearl] still has it bad", like the conditioning to worship a Diamond is just a cute sapphic "lady and her handmaiden" romance. And that happens after the movie, meaning Pearl actually learned nothing from that experience.
