And I agree about Alderaan. I’ll never understand why Lucas created Naboo instead of just using Alderaan as one of the principal settings.
As much as I agree, I can’t help but feel that if he had done this, we’d be calling it the prime example of “universe shrinkage”
If Anakin wasn’t from Tatooine, Anakin didn’t build C3PO, and Jabba the Hutt, Boba Fett, and Chewbacca didn’t appear, it would be completely fine and no one would have said anything or been any the wiser.
Personally, I am of the opinion that having Anakin being born on Tatooine was actually a good idea. A New Hope heavily implies that he was born and grew up on Tatooine, especially when Obi-Wan tells Luke that Owen thought that Anakin should have remained on Tatooine and not get involved with the Jedi. Why should have Anakin remained on Tatooine if he didn’t grew up there? I think it’s clear that Obi-Wan’s sentence about Owen’s wishes implied that Anakin was born on Tatooine.
You’re right, A New Hope pretty clearly implies Anakin was originally from Tatooine. The problem is that A New Hope was written under the assumption that Anakin and Vader were separate characters. When George Lucas wrote that dialogue, he was not thinking that Luke was actually hiding from anything. Luke was just an average farmboy who happened to live where he lived. But by the time Return of the Jedi was written, Luke was now Vader’s son, and was sent to Tatooine as an infant because it was a remote location far from the reach of the Empire. But this change to the backstory implies that Vader/Anakin shouldn’t be from Tatooine, because otherwise sending Luke to hide there comes off as a really bad decision. I mean, there’s a reason that modern “witness protection” programs choose locations completely detached from any former associates of the protected witness, and require a complete identity change.
In my opinion, once Vader and Anakin were merged into a single character, Anakin should no longer be from Tatooine. I’d rather just ignore or reinterpret Obi Wan’s line in A New Hope, rather than have to squirm around coming up with excuses for why anyone would hide Luke on the same planet his father grew up on.