Of course he didn’t want the lightsabre that he’d already given up. Wouldn’t it be even weirder for him to be all “oh, thank you so much for giving me back the sabre I purposefully discarded after I tried to murder my nephew and turned him away from the light, it would look great on my wall!”
That was actually Anakin’s lightsaber, the one given to him by Ben that he lost in the duel on Bespin, that most people presumed was lost forever after having been shunted out of a trash chute into the atmosphere of a gas giant. He didn’t make a conscious decision to give that one up, though I understand his reluctance to accept any lightsaber in the first place what with everything that happened that we learn about throughout the movie, but the casual toss-over-the-shoulder for laughs was pretty inappropriate considering the tone of the same scene at the end of 7, explicitly framed in such a way implying that Luke had an emotional reaction to seeing either Rey or the Lightsaber again.
Fair point, but let’s not pretend that that scene in 7 was anything more than JJ’s usual mystery box, set up with no plan for execution, writing.
How on earth Disney allowed a trilogy of films in a franchise as massive as star wars to not even have a speculative outline for an overall arc blows my mind.
Oh, for sure, I’m pinning the blame on JJ for the bad setup and RJ for running with it without a plan. Disney Lucasfilm should have had a tighter grip on the project from the very start.