I bring up Gary Mitchell because what he does makes the force powers look like pre-school tricks.
And again, space opera is science fiction. It is a sub genre of science fiction. That is not me, that is not Amazon, that is the entire speculative fiction arm of the publishing industry, along with the writers, readers, and reviewers. You are arguing against an entire industry that uses that sub-genre on a daily basis. Space Opera is not genre bending. It is a long establish sub-genre of science fiction. You can choose not to agree with them, but as they are the experts it is kind of silly. If you want to have a serious discussion about genres, you need to know the genres, their history, and what separates them. Do some stories cross genres? Yes, but they usually don’t do very well because they aren’t what people are expecting. Dune’s genre is not questioned, Flash Gordon’s genre is not questioned (being from the 30’s and predating Space Opera, it is a planetary romance).
And the only people who insist that science fiction must be totally believable are those fixated on hard science fiction being the only true science fiction. They are wrong and being snobs about something that has a lot more variety than that. Or just misinformed. Very little science fiction adheres to strictly scientifically possible ideas and most extrapolates where science and technology can take us. A lot of space opera puts the science in the background and focus’s on the story and let’s the setting take care of the science.
And like any genre, science fiction can take inspiration from other areas. History often has given a story its structure. Different authors are inspired by different cultures (sometimes their own and sometimes others). It is pretty obvious that Herbert was inspired by the Arabs for Dune. Asimov was inspired by The Rise And Fall of the Roman Empire. Heinlein was inspired by his military service. Lucas was inspired by samurai films (and Toshiro Mifune in particular). Ben is even dressed in samurai like robes (some of the unused art has it far closer to what samurai wore). He even considered hiring Mifune, but language was an issue. Sure, on the surface Star Wars looks like wizards in space, but when you dig and examine all the things that Lucas was inspired by, it goes much deeper than that. Jedi are warrior monks (from Japanese culture) and Luke is a small town hot rodder. Han is a space pirate (and part hot rodder). Chewbacca is Lucas’s dog, Indiana. R2 and Theepio are comic relief and lifted almost exact from Hidden Fortress. Vader is based on all the henchmen from Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, but tied in as an evil version of warrior monk. The force came from a desire to have morality for good and evil without invoking any real religion. You can see it mature in the drafts and the powers grow. You see mythic structure inspiring the story, but you don’t see fantasy. The final product is considered science fiction and specifically space opera. When people in the industry want to cit an example of space opera, they use Star Wars.