I mean, one of Zahn's recent Thrawn books literally had a scene where Padme takes a break from the conflict at hand to visit the planet from Disney's Galaxy's Edge Park, and sample items from the theme park menu in a shallow, transparent advertisement for the park. Another book retconned the name "Skywalker" into being the Chiss word for "Wayfinder", in order to better tie into the McGuffins featured in The Rise of Skywalker.
B-But, no, guise. Zahn totally isn't a hack writer well past his prime when working in the world of Star Wars. He had a gun pressed to his temple when he included all that garbage. It totally wasn't him, I promise!!!1!
Most of them have to work with Disney one way or another. Surprise, surprise, the real world operates differently from some dank forum on the internet where you can whine and bitch and moan about your corporate overlords. The workplace is a different game entirely. If you wrote a SW novel today and it didn't include Disney's stuff, or you openly tried to fuck with their established canon, then it's not getting published. Especially when Disney was trying to promote things like Galaxy's Edge and Rise of Skywalker.
Welcome to the corporate world, kid. You either play ball with the boss, or you don't play at all. Lucas was more liberal in this regard, but thanks to all the Prequel-haters who kept blasting the man as the cinematic equivalent of "Worse than Satan", he left and sold the farm to Disney. Star Wars as a franchise is now the private property of the Mouse, it's not some story that's in the public domain where you can write your own story that gives the Sequels the middle finger. And if you tried to make money off it without their approval, at the best case scenario, you're fired, in the worst case, sued.
Ah yes, more Dolchstoßlegende mixed with 'grass is greener' hindsight to provide apologia for flawed work that could have been made better. And that is the problem; with a second draft the prequels would've actually been far more likely to match the potential you can see in them. And yes, there are genuinely bad moments in those films a second draft or punch up would've fixed. People usually do not deserve shit films simply because of wanting something to be better.
But we DID get better, didn't we? We got the Clone Wars Multimedia Project which showed the Prequels from some very interesting angles. We had the KOTOR games which were, in essence, a soft reboot of the OT but re-told in a different time period. We got the Clone Wars cartoon by Genndy Tartakovsky, which showed the Clone Wars better than the Prequels did, with a Grievous who was a legitimate threat and massive battles that fit the galaxy-spanning scale of the Clone Wars. We had games like the Republic Commando game, which showed a grittier side to the Clone Wars, the Battlefront 2 game, which showed the clones' side of the story as they went from soldiers of the Republic to Imperial Stormtroopers, we had the Episode III game which at some points, did some things better than the films.
The reason why I wasn't so mad at the flaws of the Prequels is because they were a thimble in the sea of content that we were drowning in, most of which was good. And yes, since Lucas' company made all this stuff, and he handed out paychecks to the people who did the work, it does count as his output, even if it was indirectly. Lucas was humble enough to say "let others take a crack at it" because he knew he was flawed. Other directors or creators wouldn't be so liberal with their work.
Heck, Lucas even added things from the EU to the Prequels, like Coruscant being the capital, the Jedi Council, and even Anakin got a scar in his face in between AOTC and ROTS because one of the comics had Ventress give him one. It was a shared universe in the best sense of the word, because 90% of the time, they paid attention to even the minor details like a scar in someone's face, and even though Lucas was far from perfect, the end result of this shared universe was that the SW universe was far deeper and richer than most sci-fi series.
I also don't particularly care for the whole artificial overemphasis of a portion of a fragmenting and dying fanbase that's been repeated more and more often as of late. I genuinely think we're in the "you're losing money no matter what" period here. There isn't enough of a fanbase to even bother with it, since you turned them off. And casuals ain't watching because of the previous piles of crap and the current one also being crap.
That's because people are getting bored. Even if Ahsoka was AAA+ good, it'd just be a retread of themes and ideas that we've already seen before. Maybe they were gonna do something different with Baylan, but with the actor dead, that shit's on hiatus until they recast him.
It has the energy of a failing resteraunt owner screaming about a customer base they see in their heads, but not understanding they're in the hole and already losing that anyway.
Like I said, Star Wars proper died in 2005 with the films finishing off. The EU died after the sale. Everything else is just fanfiction. TFA and Rogue One was fanfiction for Prequel-haters, TLJ and RoS was fanfiction for SJWs, and the Filoniverse is fanfiction for TCW fans who were little kids back in 2008 when that show first aired.
I guarantee this was added so Dave's clone trooper OCs can't die.
It was more along the lines of Filoni wanting to pull the whole "DINDU NUFFIN" shit with the clones after he "humanized" them. God forbid the clones might have political beliefs that would make them trust the Chancellor more than the Jedi. Like say, the fact that the Chancellor appears to many people as the only person holding the Republic together in trying times? Or maybe some clones just doesn't like the Jedi because the Jedi general they were stuck with was too much of a pansy to let them commit war crimes on Separatist civilia-I mean, traitors?
