Cimorene

You have many good points here, especially about Thandie Newton, whose fridging prompted a knee-jerk revulsion toward the movie-makers in my local viewing group, and negatively colored their view of the rest of the movie. (Not that it's great about women overall, but that bit was completely egregious.)

Introducing droid rights so explicitly was actually the most interesting thing about the movie, I thought. The initial SW-ANH showed the droids as apparently sentient and either enslaved or a servant class. This is kind of ambiguous: are they sentient beings? On the one hand, wires and diodes and programming. On the other, blatant use of free will to subvert restraining bolts and the goals of humans and other organic beings. It's a genre fantasy element on par with FTL hyperdrive and the Force, but as characters they pass the Turing test.

So, maybe mechanical beings don't have to have human-style genders, but with free will they could very well choose gender identities. At that point, L3-37 as self-constructed out of spare parts becomes a grotesque but apt commentary on women's roles on Earth, and her push for droid freedom underlines the goals of the (at that point nascent) Rebel Alliance. L3's death wraps up that sequence far too neatly, especially as it's played only to give Lando a moment of grief. However, the droid revolt happened, and L3 existed on screen as a character who affected other characters and contributed to the plot.