One thing to remember is that Star Wars was a rush-job, with budget problems and a lot of people working in the SFX crew that had never worked on a feature film before, and in some cases, doing things never attempted before.
I don’t know if I would agree that it was “rushed”. GL made the decision to use a lot of really short special effects shots, matte paintings in particular, and made the creative decision to get a lot of mediocre quality matte paintings for short shorts where “no one will notice the bad quality” instead of ordering just a handful of really great quality matte paintings which is what every other film-maker would have done at the time. No one else would have ordered matte paintings to use for just one shot lasting up to 4 or 5 seconds. I’m sure the artists hated it, after all matte paintings are an artwork and good ones take quite a lot of time and effort to get right.