Star Wars was never a “niche” genre. It’s not a genre unto itself (despite various people’s attempts to make it as such) either. And if you see a similarity between superheroes and fantasy-based mythologies, it’s because they both draw from the same ideas. Jedi are, more or less, superheroes.
In 1977, what Lucas was doing with Star Wars was visually unlike anything ever tried within the sci-fi/fantasy genres, and it was also considered to be FAST. Very, very fast. It seems slow now, but in 1977 the editing and pacing of that movie was considered breakneck. You’re arguing it has to look and feel like it did in 1977 and that’s death. It’s got to speak to the kids who are watching the movies in the time period they’re coming out, so they can grab onto it without having to read a bunch of wikipedia entries or watch a bunch of YouTube videos to find a hook or an “in” for the movies.
Parts of Star Wars were fast for the time, but the first half of the film was fairly normal in pacing for the time, and even a bit slow at times in order to take the time to draw the audience into that world. You are acting as though filmmaking is fundamentally different forty or fifty years on, whereas there are movies being made right now which are paced and edited like Star Wars or to be even slower. Sure, most are faster, but take something like The Adventures of Robin Hood. That movie is a briskly paced breeze and came out decades before Star Wars. Immersing the audience in a world takes time, and to judge by popular consensus the new movie simply doesn’t allow for that in its breakneck pace.
If it shares the same visual language with other movies they like, and then uses that shared language to introduce new ideas on top of that, then it works! Part of the reason The Force Awakens made as much money as it did is BECAUSE it moved like an Abrams film while looking like a Star Wars movie, for lack of a better term. All the iconography people recognized for 40 years was being lit, shot, framed, and edited in a way they’d never seen it before, and that was EXCITING. It wasn’t JUST nostalgia at play. The filmmaking DID matter.
Everyone is different and has different tastes. For me it was a big turn-off to see the Abrams style and boilerplate blockbuster CGI effects applied to the Star Wars universe. Even the prequels had a more iconic aesthetic in their CGI than the sequel trilogy. Filmmaking does matter. Rogue One managed to get a ‘model’ look to most of their ships because Gareth Edwards worked hard with the art department to make the film feel of a piece with the universe and pushed the CGI in a new direction from what is usually seen, and people loved it. As for the rest of the elements at play in TFA, the choices are very much geared towards an action movie aesthetic and this can be hard to reconcile with the (at best) adventure genre of Star Wars.
There’s no real reason to handcuff directors and cinematographers who have more -and better- tools, to styles developed 40 years ago. Or even 30 years ago. It just doesn’t make sense. Star Wars can’t be hermetically sealed off like that, it’s going to suffocate that way. And it’s not like other films and filmmakers are going to sit around and decline using those tools to tell their own stories. People are going to go to the theaters not to hear new stories, because most stories have almost NOTHING new to them. But they will go to see new ways of telling them. Star Wars needs to be part of that. If that means whip pans, crazy camera moves, speed ramping… so be it. So long as the tool is right for the story element being executed, to quote a certain Chancellor: DEW IT.
Nobody is suggesting that Star Wars be handcuffed to an old way of filmmaking. George Lucas was pushing the boundaries of the technical craft all the way through the OT and the PT. Star Wars has always existed on the frontier of technology, in fact one of the reasons the ST feels so stale is because it stopped being innovative and started blending into the industry standard for effects. You can still innovate on effects while remaining true to the feeling of a classic tale.