Bingowings said:

Once again you are placing a human contemporary Western template over a fictional alien culture from a galaxy far far away a long time in the past.

If you have ever tried to get a girl of that age to eat sprouts or tidy their room you may see a certain wisdom in having such a being as the diplomatic valve between her people and the other peoples of the Republic.

A good writer would work it out or dump it.

But we are talking about a film produced by a contemporary Western human that reflects Western values (a bit too much, one might say, what with the blatant racism on display) for a contemporary Western human audience. I guess the key point here is “good writer.” With the prequel trilogy being so much about the ultimate fate of the galaxy, this was too important an element of the films not to have been dealt with. If there was, indeed, a cultural reason for such an arrangement, such a thing should have been established instead of mentioned offhand.