^ I mean the main issue is Luke clearly acts young. He whines, wants to go to college and hangout with Biggs, etc. He’s clearly written to be a teenager.

But it really is funny how lucky George Lucas is in terms of making retcons plausible. His dialog is always JUST vague enough that multiple interpretations can work. Like Tarkin’s “Surely he must be dead by now” could be interpreted as either (1) too much time has passed and Obi-Wan would be so old he must realistically be dead, or (2) the Jedi purge was so effective it seems unlikely Obi-Wan would survive. But honestly, I think if you did some kind of scientific test, something like >60% of people would interpret the line to mean (1) too much time passed (assuming the test somehow removed all knowledge of Star Wars from the test subjects).