Look, all evidence points to him constantly changing his mind. Yes, he’s said he wanted to do 9 films. There was also a time when he wanted to do 12. In 2005 he’d settled on 6 and hasn’t walked back on it since. Yes, he did propose Sequels to Disney, but only because they were gonna make them anyway.
All creatives and artists change their mind. Why is George so ridiculed for evolving and changing his stance and opinions from time to time about the story he wants to tell? I’ll never understand it.
He quickly trimmed things down from twelve to nine in the 80’s. Then he changed his stance in the late 90’s to early 2000’s from nine to six but whose to say that wasn’t because of the backlash that he was getting?
He also said many times the Sequels he had in mind were never as fleshed out as the Prequels. I think the most likely scenario is he only had notions and a handful of definitive plot points of where he wanted to take things and the development took greater shape in 2011 when he started to get fully creative and exploring what he wanted to tell in his Sequels. He incorporated new ideas and ones he had in the early days and during the making of the Prequels. Afterall in Paul Duncan’s book he talked about how he wanted to explore things with the more metaphysical aspects of the Force in the Prequels but held back due to the backlash he faced from Midi-Chlorians. I also don’t think Steven Spielberg or Rick McCallum would be spitballing if he didn’t have something in mind of where he wanted to take the story. Even Mark Hamill has alluded to this.
He nearly made Episode VII himself before handing it over to Disney. We don’t know whether or not they would’ve ever done a Sequel Trilogy or not. It’s not clear if they would have done it or not. It’s more than likely but we don’t know for absolute sure.