Structures are only as important as the weight they can bear and the ideas they can house. “following classic mythological structures” shouldn’t really be a measuring stick for whether Star Wars movies are quality or not, especially if the only real reason those structures are being (loosely, raggedly) adhered to is due to that aforementioned self-referentialism.

W/R/T Lucas, time and again we’ve seen that the man gets distracted by the grandiosity of his OWN imagination and mythmaking, and one of those first distractions was Moyer and co. creating a cottage industry over the examining mythological underpinning of Star Wars. Once that happened, the sharp focus on the streamlined storytelling engine that was Star Wars (an engine that was used to fuel a story whose main point really was “do the right thing and fight tyranny no matter what.”) began to blur and turn in on itself. And then he started retconning it into a family-centered soap opera that became, more or less, a story about forgiving your dad for being a real dick to everyone. And to patch over all the weird dips, gaps, and holes introduced into the piecemeal’d story as he went from the simplicity of 1977 to “the end” of 2005, he came to increasingly rely on self-referencing and explicitly pointing out to everyone the structure of what he was doing, in an effort to shore up just how flimsy and far-afield from what made Star Wars work everything had become.