Definitively agree. Maybe it's Disney time, no king rules forever, as they say. But what makes it sad is that Star Wars itself definitively got a decline before it's time. There is such a thing as franchise fatigue, but not in the way Iger and KK think as an excuse for failing: Let me explain:
I think part of the secret of the long term success of Star Trek and Star Wars is that they knew when to "pause" for a few years and then earn a lot of money with a strong comeback.
I think Lucas understood this perfectly hence the reason he waited for 16 years before making the prequels, and why there was a 3-year gap between movies.
Yes, your die-hard fans will never get bored and will always be buying novels, audio novels, and comics during the years of drought of the main releases, but the normies (I hate that term but it fits) will get bored eventually, so it's best to retire the franchise for a few years and then capitalize on their nostalgia for a renaissance and earn a lot of money in the process with old fans bringing new people.
Don't believe me?
This era is actually the third time it happens. Star Trek second revival was during the 90's and Star Wars during the prequels. Doctor Who is currently during the decline of its second.
The ST was supposed to be the huge third renaissance of Star Wars for casuals, this time with Star Wars just releasing the finale of their trilogy Star Wars craze should be at its highest right now. But that didn't happen. ROS will be forgotten in a few months once the SJWS move to the next nerd thing to virtue signal.
All thanks KK, Rian, and J.J killing all interest on Star Wars from old fans, people are really only interested about a tv show, and although it's a cool sow, that's just embarassing for Star Wars..
TL;DR: Disney might be in decline, but Star Wars didn't have to.
I think the biggest issue was that Disney tried to "Marvelize" Star Wars from the outset, without understanding why that would be a poor decision.
Part of the reason why I believe Marvel has had a decade-long streak of well-received movies, from moderate successes to biggest-movie-ever successes (even if they had to rerelease with a few more minutes just to edge out Avatar), is because of the variety inherent with adapting a multitude of capeshit stories. Each new movie is either introducing a new hero, or revisiting an older one after having a few years away from them. Marvel didn't release all three Thor movies back-to-back, they dropped a few movies in between, so by the time you see him again, you're excited once more. Maybe not the best example, but you get my point. Like you said, there was room to breathe for individual characters/groups, even if you were still seeing Marvel movies every few months.
Marvel also built up relatively slowly over time, for modern Hollywood anyway. In a day and age when we get three Marvel movies almost every year, it's easy to forget sometimes that it took them five years to start consistently releasing two movies a year, and four more after that to get to the three movie point. (As an aside, next year only has two, but 2021 has four, so they're still averaging three per year.) Considering how something of its scale had never been tried before, it makes sense that they'd start small, drop teasers, get people interested, and work up to the first big crossover. And after the wild success of The Avengers, that's when the rapid expansion began.
So why didn't it work for Star Wars? For the first point, the trilogy movies are following the same characters through a (supposedly) cohesive storyline, so it's important not to wear out your audience by dropping each chapter so quickly. There's no anticipation or buildup, no hype generation. Having that extra year between movies could have made a world of difference both in their production and in their reception.
This did get me thinking about why this doesn't apply to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I think I have an answer for that. Aside from just being much better movies, this was a major high fantasy production, something that wasn't all that common in Hollywood at the time, or even today. It also helps that the filming for the whole trilogy was completed before Fellowship even came out, so the editing and visual effects could be wrapped up fairly quickly for each movie. Because of the novelty, audiences were not only eager to watch the following movies, they did so in droves. We'd seen six Star Wars movies by the time TFA opened, not counting Clone Wars, so even if people were excited, it was mostly seeing things we'd seen before.
To the second point, it's clear that Disney wanted to make their $4 billion investment back as quickly as possible, and the only way they were going to do that would be to get as many butts in theaters as they could. Short of building more theaters or strongarming theaters into more showings, they needed to produce a bunch of movies to get people to show up and watch them. Alternating between trilogy movies and anthology movies might have worked, to be honest, but multiple things worked against Disney here. There was the aforementioned scheduling problem of rushing too much out too fast, of course; instead of alternating every year, maybe every one and a half years between trilogy-anthology-trilogy would have been better, giving each movie three years of development time.
And the other problem was all the executive meddling, from Kathleen shoehorning her garbage ideas (probably the entirety of Rey's character, Phasma) to forcing out directors that had their own ideas and replacing them with yes-men that would do what the studio said. There's all the stuff from the Rogue One trailers that never showed up in the film, and of course we'll never see the Lord/Miller cut of Solo. Colin Trevorrow got out after the disaster that was TLJ, and I don't blame him.
This has gotten a bit rambling on my end because I'm up far later than I should be, so I'll wrap up with this: Disney didn't know what the fuck they were doing when they bought Lucasfilm. All Iger wanted was yet another property he could sink his claws into and whore out to the masses, but thanks to a bunch of incompetent morons (Iger included), it's nowhere near the blockbuster series he wants it to be.
