Originally posted by Dolos
Palpatine's aging was unnatural.
Palpatine wasn't aging naturally up till the incident at Death Star?
He had learned Transfer Essence which allowed him to survive the hinted incident and start fresh. During this phase, he wasn't aging or so it seems.
Originally posted by Dolos
The failure of his clone bodies was the result of sabotage, nothing more.
No. The clone bodies were not good enough to sustain his power and this is why they deteriorated fast during possession.
That sabotage event is different.
Originally posted by Dolos
Palpatine could possess "proper individuals", such as he did after his first death, before inhabiting his clone bodies he inhabited his Grand Vizier Sate Prestage.
Yes, he could.
Originally posted by Dolos
You're focusing on Vitiate's age and time spent in studying, when you should consider this on the opposing argument:The Rule of Two had evolved different teachings than the Sith Empire, and built upon whatever information Vitiate had to study, a thousand years of progressively stronger Sith Lords had learned fresh secrets of the Dark, less esoteric, more state of the art alchemy and aspects of the Dark Side. Take Darth Tenebrous and his Maxi-chlorians for example.
Then once Palpatine gained access to vastly more information upon becoming the Emperor, the information he now had access to was deeper in scale and scoop than Vitiate's. He had about six decades to study a far vaster database of Sith knowledge, three of those decades he had access to all Jedi knowledge upon raiding the Jedi Temple Library database.
Therefore the Emperor had EVERYTHING he needed to be stronger than Vitiate or any other Sith, he had knowledge of the means to achieve the greater power, and through the Way of the Dark his sensitivity grew infinitely after the Grand Experiment, after killing off the Jedi and billions of species throughout the clone war, and finally after his first death.
RO2 was unique in the sense of strategy that it adopted to deal with the threat of the Jedi.
Sith gained considerable power during TOR era; Exar Kun's Empire; Revan's Sith Empire; and Vitiate's Sith Empire. However, Sith weakened considerably after the losses. This was apparent from the conditions of Sith during the time of Darth Bane.
Knowledge gained from Revan's holocron paved way for the Sith to regain their once lost power and so began the RO2 phase. Yes, the ideology behind RO2 was that only two Sith Lords would exist at a time and the Apprentice would have to surpass the Master in terms of power to advance the agenda of Sith.
Power wise, every member of RO2 phase was impressive. No doubt about this. However, this doesn't means that Sith Lords in previous eras were weaker. No.
Sith did became weak for an extensive period of time but regained eventually their power. However, Sith became weak once again during the time of Luke.
Also, I shall point out that Sidious managed to discover significant level of lost Sith Lore and this helped him in considerably improving his understanding of the Force. Much of the abilities that Sidious have demonstrated, have been performed by his predecessors. In fact, Sidious borrowed lot of ideas from TOR era Sith.
Midi-chlorian manipulation is a very old phenomenon because Vitiate have accomplished this objective. The only difference is that devices emerged during RO2 phase which allowed medication examination of Midi-Chlorians.
Originally posted by Dolos
Even Plagueis was aware of Vitiate's planned ritual to Force drain the galaxy, that alone makes me question if Palpatine didn't ALREADY have more knowledge of the Dark Side than Vitiate before his ascension as Galactic Emperor - giving him access to esoteric teachings of the Force encompassing billions of worlds.
We don't know. Vitiate had much longer time to delve in to the teachings of the dark side and we do not know about the full extent of his abilities.