Sometimes I feel the Star Wars universe is unnecessarily big and confused, and that it contains a disproportionate amount of material, although there’s no need to. If I were George Lucas, this is the way I would have organized the Star Wars universe from the beginning:
- A “Down of the Jedi” style long comic series to explore the birth of the Jedi and the Republic.
- A “Tales of the Jedi” style comic series to explore the birth of the Sith and the Great War between the Jedi and the Sith, which leed to the Sith “extinction” at Russan.
- A trilogy of comics to explore Darth Bane’s story.
- A “Star Wars: Republic” style long comic series to explore the whole Prequel Era, the Clone Wars and Anakin’s fall. No Prequel films, everything Is made in comics.
- A “Star Wars: Dark Times” style comic series to explore the Dark Times.
- The Original Trilogy.
- A “Tales of the Jedi” style long comic series to explore the post-ROTJ period, at least until the definitive defeat of the Empire.
That’s it. This way, there wouldn’t be too much material, the universe outside of the movies wouldn’t be so big, and perhaps people would be less confused.
The issue you run into with a really tight, concrete canon is that the duds are harder to ignore. If a book, show, or movie is hard canon and ends up being really bad, all future material still has adhere to it.
I personally prefer a looser, more open canon because it makes the universe feel bigger, in a way. It may be more confusing for someone new to it, but it’s also more interesting. If you lay out an exact timeline and every story in the canon is designed for the purpose of explaining each stage of the timeline, you run the risk of the stories becoming boring or predictable.
In hindsight, Lucasfilm’s choice to label the old EU stories as “Legends” was actually kind of brilliant. These are all meant be stories from a long time ago, so of course they’d be legends, and just like real world myths and legends, they grew organically over time and often contradicted each other.