So them thinking the Death Star was fake and gay is retarded. Not massively retarded, but it's a Dave-esque decision that makes them look stupid and highlights how the EU is needed to know this shit and also needed to not be known to have you suck down the slop.
Not quite. The Empire already had been capable of destroying worlds with ships, so it makes some sense for the council to doubt the idea that the Empire would make a massive battle station that can superlaser planets into oblivion. Especially when the Senate was still there, looking over the finances. The Empire pretty much had to fund the Death Star using money that slipped by the Senate oversight committee, or slush funds they stashed on the side.
It's a telling difference that once the Senate was dissolved, the Empire was able to rebuild the Death Star within a fraction of the time, (4 years) since there was no Senate to tell Palpatine "no". He just wrote off what was needed to build the station, and off the supplies went to Endor to build the damn thing.
Also by bragging about how the leaders of the Rebel Alliance are figure heads, you now can see that RatCo making the new republic weak aspect oozing in if you squint correctly. So it makes coping by ignoring and trying to slot it in away from RatCo just that little bit harder.
By doing that, Disney undermined the very message they taught in Andor, since the democracy that these unsung heroes helped restore through their sacrifices just wound up being a nothingburger anyways. Krennic was right; the rebels' cause was just "lawless ineptitude". The post-ROTJ shows like Mandalorian and Ahsoka show the Rebels' New Republic as being completely inept; easily infiltrated by enemy spies, its senators unwilling to take risks, and the moment you leave the core worlds, it's a lawless jungle, so Krennic was right on the money when he used those words.
So all those sacrifices by Luthen and his cohorts? Andor and Luthen killing Rebel assets to cover their tracks? The Ghorman and Ferrix massacres? All for naught, since the New Republic was about as useful as a screen door on a submarine, and it was easily subverted by fascists in the First Order who bribed the feeble-minded New Republic senators to help undermine the Republic, until the First Order could snipe the NR's head clean off its shoulders with the Starkiller Base.
And by the end of the Sequels, you have a First Order army scattered across the galaxy, now without a Supreme Leader since Kylo Ren and Palpatine are both dead. The Resistance didn't free the galaxy. They just turned it into Somalia writ large; dominated by officers with Star Destroyers and Stormtroopers. Sure, there's a rebellion against them too, but we don't know if it succeeded. For all we know, it failed, and the First Order leaders put them down, then slaughtered each other in a brutal power struggle, with trillions of people caught in the crossfire.
The Rebellion and the Resistance doomed the galaxy. That young rebel's manifesto wound up being a pile of hogwash, especially since Krennic was proven right about the "lawless ineptitude" of his foes in the post-ROTJ content.
I guess that's why I'm fixated on said specific stupid plot point (compared to more glaring ones in Andor, like the Imperial's takeover of Ghorman being dumb af & needlessly complicated. JUST KILL THE SPIDERS AND/OR RELOCATE THEM) It's extremely Dave Filoni. Filoni loves nothing more than to dumb down smart characters/make characters behave irrationally solely to create drama that pads out the runttime.
Just offer the Ghormans another farm world with nutrients that the spiders can feed off of. The Empire has millions of those. And then tell the galaxy that the gouge-mining for the Ghorman Kalkite is for the energy program that will revolutionize clean energy for everyone. That way, the sacrifice of the planet Ghorman sounds good on paper, and the reasonable Ghormans will pack their bags and leave. That will just leave the arrogant, stubborn, rebellious Ghormans who hate the Empire and would riot against them anyways, giving the Empire a perfect excuse to gun them down, because not only are they seditionists, but they're getting in the way of "clean energy programs" that would "benefit the galaxy".
Frame your foes as the enemy of the greater good. The Emperor was good at that; he did that to Anakin with the Jedi. Why he didn't do the same with the Ghormans puzzles me, when Krennic's sales pitch for a clean energy revolution would've worked on the galactic populace.
I'm pretty sure in Legends the Rebellion knew the Emperor/Navy high command had a desire to build planet-busting weapons; however not the Death Star specifically.
In Legends, the Rebel leaders were ON the Death Star when the Sith apprentice Starkiller rescued and united them. So they fucking know it exists; they were on the fucking thing, and there was even a window where you can see the superlaser doing test-firings.
