Some of these posts don't add up. Michael was surely in his 80s when he died. Thus, he lived with his torment for decades. How's that an easy way out? And why should he have died quickly? When one dies is a huge variable. He was diabetic, but apparently had excellent medical care. So, what was false about it?

Sonny and Connie's children were, for all practical purposes, invisible to viewers. They would not have made an effective foil for the audience. Sonny's and Lucy's affair was hugely prominent in the novel and film and stuck with audiences. That neither the novel or film hinted at a progeny from that affair only registers with viewers academically. Vinnie's manifest of Sonny's temperment early in the film is meant to remind us of Sonny. Also, it provides a contrast with the leveling of Vinnie's temperment later in the film once he became fully enmeshed in the machinations of power politics and crime. That might very well have been Sonny's evolution had he lived. Sonny's and Connie's children gave FFC nothing to work with.