No, you’re not the only one. I totally agree with you. It was stupid. In the Clone Wars Multimedia Project there wasn’t any chip, and it was done Better.
Unfortunately by living in Italy we had limited access to more niche SW literature, by the time TCW’s movie/series arrived they started catching up, but before it was a mess, i bought some republic commando and yuuzhan vong saga novels out of desperation one summer in 2006 when i went to the UK for vacation.
How did they put it in the multimedia project?