I haven’t read them but it’s pretty annoying when they just reference the same handful of planets from the movies. I mean you could come up with a thousand original planets with gourmet coffee, but it seemingly has to be one from the movies. It’s like if Han told Luke he looked like he was strong enough to pull the ears off a Tusken Raider or something; instead of an interesting new thing, we just get an old thing again. Make a moon called Kona IX or something, it’s automatically better.

Also it’s pretty clear to me (at least) that the Story Group isn’t really vetting stuff and is just signing off on broad strokes, so it’s literally just the old EU rubber stamp strategy applied to what is mostly garbage again. Sure, we had some good stuff, but for every Thrawn Trilogy, there was a Children of the Jedi and a New Jedi Order and a Courtship of Princess Leia. Yuck. I felt like they were saying they’d be really closely looking at stuff to ensure it all jived and made sense and that would mean there would be a quality control element and we’d have a new EU that was mostly good with some bad, but I suppose not.