One of the big failings I see with the prequel trilogy, is a lack of overall planning by GL. I know there are people out there that cling to the idea that he had it all worked out before he rolled film on A New Hope, but it just aint so. The biggest issue for me is scales of time. The empire has to arise in Episode 3, we also know that episode 3 ends at least 20 years before A New Hope, because Luke and Leia are about 20 in that film, and they're born in 3. So, that means, unless episode 3 spans a large amount of time, that the rise of the empire and the Jedi Purges have to take place within that 20 year time frame. Yet, by the end of that, the public have forgotten the jedi almost completely, and the Empire seems to have been an omni present force for some time. I don't know, it just seems to me that the time between the empires rise, the fall of the jedi, and ANH should be longer. When I watched ANH, I never got the impression that the empire was the same age as Luke. I always felt the empire was at least 50 years old. I'd have set it up so that the empire came into existence, and the jedi forced underground when Obi Wan was in his early to mid 20's, and Anakin in his mid to late teens. Anakin wouldn't have turned to the darkside until after the rise of the empire. That's just my take on it anyway, but I've gotten off topic.

The Expanded Universe to me hasn't been anything too special. I loved the Zahn books, failed to read the X-Wing series, but everything else just did nothing for me. The short stories were alright, but nothing special. The Kevin J. Anderson stuff was just dreck, as is the majority of his writing. The corellian trilogy was so riddled with spelling and grammatical errors that it made me wonder if they employed a proof reader for that series. I've just found all of the novels repetitive. I enjoyed some of the comic books, particularly the X-Wing series. All in all though, the Expanded Universe does little for me, and with the exception of the Zahn novels, I wouldn't miss any of it if it were expunged from the record tomorrow. the EU is mostly moot now anyways, considering GL's inattentiveness to detail in regards to continuity. Oh well.