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To address several points brought up in this thread,
I think George should've taken a more supervisory role in the EU, rather than simply handing it off and watching the dollars flow in. It's clear that the idea of continuing the story through books was thought up in order to help Lucasfilm build itself up again financially in the early 90's. Make no mistake, they said it was the "official" continuation, which kinda makes George's statements to the contrary all the more annoying.
George needed a way of making money for the company, and the books provided that. He was too obsessed with getting the PT made to bother with the post-RotJ timeline, especially when it was already making that much money without his involvement. Besides, maybe he really did consider RotJ "the end" and thought there would never be an Ep7. He did condense the original plan for episodes 6 through 9 into just one movie, so this is kinda true anyway.
What would've been ideal is George stepping back and being the over-arching supervisor of everything, writing the story outline for the PT and the post-Jedi EU but letting other screenwriters, directors and authors fill in the details. Instead he was hyper-focused on the PT and paid little attention to anything else.
As for the PT somehow ruining the EU, I don't get the argument here. There was barely any EU there to ruin, unless you're referring to the stuff brought up in the Thrawn books. GL specifically mandated early on that no EU stories be set within that timeframe. It's a far cry from the mountains of post-RotJ material that now no longer happened.
Oh, and the ST didn't "need" to be set 30 years later. They could've set Ep7 at the 40 years later point that the books were up to. Ben Skywalker was almost 20 years old IIRC. That actually would've made a good starting point for a new series of movies. Also, they wouldn't have needed to bring up whatever's transpired in the 40 years since Jedi. They could've figured out a way to tell an original story that also happens to take place at that point in the timeline. They would've had three whole years to "build up" to it in the EU anyway.