He absolutely was. The entire premise of the Sequels grew out of his initial outline in some capacity. Rey and Finn as characters date back to his involvement, as does Luke’s exile. He was personally present in early meetings and even approved some concept art. Was the finished product his vision? Not in the slightest, but that doesn’t change the fact that he was involved early on.
According to Bob Iger:
"Early on, Kathy brought J.J. and Michael Arndt up to Northern California to meet with George at his ranch and talk about their ideas for the film. George immediately got upset as they began to describe the plot and it dawned on him that we weren’t using one of the stories he submitted during the negotiations.
The truth was, Kathy, J.J., Alan, and I had discussed the direction in which the saga should go, and we all agreed that it wasn’t what George had outlined. George knew we weren’t contractually bound to anything, but he thought that our buying the story treatments was a tacit promise that we’d follow them, and he was disappointed that his story was being discarded."
He wasn’t involved in the making of Episode VII. Loose threads and cherry picking doesn’t count to me. Especially when they claimed early on that they only made a few departures and not wholesale changes. That proved to be factually incorrect. Same with when they claimed the protagonists would be teenagers but that’s not true either as George himself said they were in their 20’s. With regards to the points you made the character that became Rey was known as Kira, Tayrn, and even Winter in early concepts from George apparently according to Pablo Hidalgo but even he might be wrong about certain details as he said Luke died in George’s Episode VIII but we have both George and Mark Hamill dispute this claim by saying Luke died in Episode IX. The broad stroke of a girl Jedi becoming the Jedi Master seems to come from George but that’s an easy thing to cherry pick. She was also a Solowalker. She was not in thr Sequels we got. Same with the Solowalker son falling to the Dark Side. The character that became Finn was nothing like George envisioned either as it was Lawrence Kasdan who came up with the idea to make him a deserted stormtrooper. The concept art that he approved ended up getting discarded in favour of Original Trilogy 2.0. You can see the creativity die as he exited for nostalgia in X-Wings and TIE Fighters instead of Darth Talon, Solowalker Grandchildren, and a sphere shaped Jedi Temple. The list of differences goes on and on.
George’s Sequel Trilogy:
Then after the Rebels won, there were no more stormtroopers in my version of the third trilogy.
I had planned for the first trilogy to be about the father, the second trilogy to be about the son, and the third trilogy to be about the daughter and the grandchildren.
Episode VII, VIII, and IX would take ideas from what happened after the Iraq War. “Okay, you fought the war, you killed everybody, now what are you going to do?” Rebuilding afterwards is harder than starting a rebellion or fighting the war. When you win the war and you disband the opposing army, what do they do? The stormtroopers would be like Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist fighters that joined ISIS and kept on fighting. The stormtroopers refuse to give up when the Republic win.
They want to be stormtroopers forever, so they go to a far corner of the galaxy, start their own country and their own rebellion.
There’s a power vacuum so gangsters, like the Hutts, are taking advantage of the situation, and there is chaos. The key person is Darth Maul, who had been resurrected in The Clone Wars cartoons—he brings all the gangs together.
Paul Duncan: Was Darth Maul the main villain?
George Lucas: Yeah, but he’s very old, and we have two versions of him. One is with a set of cybernetic legs like a spider, and then later on he has metal legs and he was a little bit bigger, more of a superhero. We did all this in the animated series, he was in a bunch of episodes.
Darth Maul trained a girl, Darth Talon, who was in the comic books as his apprentice. She was the new Darth Vader, and most of the action was with her. So these were the two main villains of the trilogy. Maul eventually becomes the godfather of crime in the universe because, as the Empire falls, he takes over.
The movies are about how Leia—I mean, who else is going to be the leader?—is trying to build the Republic. They still have the apparatus of the Republic but they have to get it under control from the gangsters. That was the main story.
It starts out a few years after Return of the Jedi and we establish pretty quickly that there’s this underworld, there are these offshoot stormtroopers who started their own planets, and that Luke is trying to restart the Jedi. He puts the word out, so out of 100,000 Jedi, maybe 50 or 100 are left. The Jedi have to grow again from scratch, so Luke has to find two- and three-year-olds, and train them. It’ll be 20 years before you have a new generation of Jedi.
By the end of the trilogy Luke would have rebuilt much of the Jedi, and we would have the renewal of the New Republic, with Leia, Senator Organa, becoming the Supreme Chancellor in charge of everything. So she ended up being the Chosen One.
“The midi-chlorians started the birth process in Anakin’s mother. The Whills communicated the command to the midi-chlorians, which activated the DNA that germinated the egg. That’s why Anakin doesn’t have a father. He was in a bizarre and metaphorical way touched by God, but in this case they happened to be one-celled animals.”
He also said that Sifo-Dyas was Palpatine’s apprentice before Darth Maul and he ordered the Clone Army while pretending to still be a Jedi the entire time.