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The self-doubt in Empire Strikes Back and The Last Jedi always felt really weird to me. Like, Luke is never actually tempted by the dark side. There is nothing the dark side ever has to offer him that he wants, he never struggles with his darker tendencies. It's just people warning him "Darth Vader used to be on our side, then he turned evil, and you remind me of him". There's never actually any reason for him to turn, and never any threat that the audience could take seriously of it happening, even without plot armor. Even if he did obey the Emperor and strike down Darth Vader in anger, there's no plausible reason he would switch sides, he'd just strike down the Emperor too.
I think it's mostly just there to make it more cathartic when he does it the other way around and converts Darth Vader. But it's still weird how everyone in universe takes it so seriously.
Taking ESB alone this is a bit of an issue, though Yoda does explain it with "forever will it dominate your destiny". But ROTJ definitively answers this.
The Dark Side isn't just the target of a rival cult. It's literally space heroin, with the attendant mental and physiological changes. As with heroin, under no circumstances should you take a "sample", even for good reasons, from a weird man in a robe.
The Emperor was clearly willing and able to incapacitate Luke. If he actually had struck down Vader and resisted the Emperor, he would have woken up in a very small cell, having lost everyone he cared about and betrayed his values facing psychological torment until he broke. No amount of post-nut clarity would save him at that point.
And if he managed to kill the Emperor he would simply be the most powerful junkie.
This is perhaps the best fic detailing what would happen if Palpatine got his hands on Luke at the end of ESB and maybe my favorite series in the fandom, period (and a lot of the EU). It certainly does a better job of selling the fall than Dark Empire.
Pretty much this exact scenario plays out inThe Force Unleashed if you call on the Dark side to beat Vader.
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First there’s the Dagobah cave. It’s the payoff for a scene where Yoda explains the Dark Side: it’s the quick and easy route to power, and it’s born of haste and emotion. We immediately get a demonstration as Luke encounters a vision of Vader. He lashes out in response to fear. Since this isn’t the Jedi way, he harms only himself.
The first real temptation is Vader’s trap. Should Luke keep training or rush to the rescue? He takes the bait because he’s still not a Jedi. It’s not enough to want the right thing. You can’t be ruled by fear and anger.
Then we get the payoff. “Join me, and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son.” How’s that for a recruitment pitch? The offer of power is universal. The offer of belonging is personalized to Luke, who spent his youth dreaming of a destiny in the stars. Vader holds all the cards. We’ve seen Luke give in to his feelings before. That makes it all the sweeter when he defies Vader.
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Well, that's just because the Jedi Council knows The Truth of the Sith. (trigger warning: Yudkowsky fan fiction)
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It's not much, but he does show a lot of curiosity with Obi Wan about his father. I imagine that's the tentation, to get to know about his father. The movie doesn't do a good job of showing the internal struggle, but when he confronts Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back, at that point, he has lost his uncle and aunt, he has lost Obi Wan and the closest to a father figure he has left is a tiny green puppet who talks funny with the same voice actor as Miss Piggy.
I think the point is a variant of the idea of "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house". It could be taken in a philosophical sense, that if Luke strikes down Darth Vader in anger, he'll probably strike down the Emperor in anger too, and will be going down the path of normalizing striking down his enemies in anger, which will eventually lead to him becoming just as bad as Darth Vader and the Emperor. Letting the anger drive + the overwhelming power of being a trained force user = bad times for everyone. This is the what the prequels show with Anakin, the turning point that sets him down a dark path is getting revenge on sand people (who most likely had it coming, this is before primary canon had shown the sand people to be anything but murderous barbarian raiders). It also makes the "Only Siths deal in absolutes" quote stupid because Jedi deal in absolutes all the freaking time; it's their commitment to absolutist ethics that seemingly keeps them from turning into power-hungry murder machines.
Then there's the more literal sense of it, that if Luke had stricken down Darth Vader in anger, that this anger through some force bullshit would somehow literally feed the Emperor's power and Luke would then lose the ensuing battle. Maybe it'd give the Emperor a hold to Force Mind Break him or something.
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