This video sums up pretty well why I really love the Dark Empire comics and why so many people hate it. It’s a fun story that stretched the rules a little to allow a dead character to return so that we could further explore a set of ideas only touched upon in ROTJ, and I’ve always found it a little frustrating that the old EU, once it settled and hardened, never really dared to do something like it again.
I also find it funny that SW has ended up with some of the most nitpicky fans as it’s not really a franchise that ever seemed to care that much about the finer details to begin with. I can see why something like Star Trek need to adhere to more rules since it’s much harder sci-fi, but ironically they’ve always played very loose with the smaller details, sometimes even contradicting things within the same series.
The only time I’m really frustrated by a change or alteration on lore is when it breaks narrative cohesion or blatantly contradicts something important like how a character has always behaved or the overall theme of a series (though even these can be vague and highly subjective).
One reason the fans are so ‘nitpicky’ might be because Star Wars is famous for caring little for consistent canon and handwaving its details. Because of this, any current creator of Star Wars will feel (perhaps rightly) that the details don’t matter and everything is in service of adding drama to a story, dragging Star Wars ever further away from a sense of verisimilitude across stories. So now a fan who was okay with the moderate level of canon fragmentation during the OT may feel that the current level of extreme fragmentation is too much, and become a ‘nitpicky fan’.
This is all theoretical of course 😉