From the sound of it, everyone made the same mistake: thinking that Disney could take Star Wars and turn it into the MCU, which was and still is the gold standard of how to take a sprawling, complex, often-contradictory canon and adapt it to the big screen. RLM made it, Lucas made it, hell, I certainly made it when I heard about the sale. The idea that Disney could fail this hard on a project this straightforward wasn't on anyone's list of serious possibilities. Why would it have been? Hell, even Disney didn't know they were going to make a dog's breakfast of sci-fi's golden goose, they wouldn't have bought it if they had.
But of course, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face hire a box-wine-swilling catlady to head their boys' adventure franchise. Lucas had outgrown any creative control and needed to go, but Disney did not assert control over Kennedy as they should have. So instead of a creative with protection from editors producing high-budget, technically competent iterations of The Room, you have an uncreative corporate diversity higher producing high-budget, technically competent iterations of Waterworld.
They should have drawn up their plans for a new trilogy even before the sale went final. I remember when Marvel almost bought DC, and during the negotiations, some Marvel artists even began sketching up mock covers for Marvel's first Superman issue. They actually were honestly psyched at the idea they might own DC's comic publishing side, and the enthusiasm showed. Disney, on the other hand, just treated Star Wars as another property they can milk and use as a soapbox for liberal preaching. The only thing worse than a fool with a dumb plan is a fool without one.
Not entirely true. Myself and a bunch of people I know, we all said at the time that news of the sale came out that Disney was going to skullfuck Star Wars into the ground with a bunch of progressively dumber movies, we just didn't think it would be so soon or as bad because Rogue One was actually decent despite having a bunch of flaws.
We knew it was going to be terrible when they announced the dissolution of the Expanded Universe though, something that Lucas himself did actually embrace.
Well, you guys might be Force-sensitive to see that coming. Even I thought Disney would actually turn things fine or just make Expanded Universe movies until the heat death of the universe or something. To me, Rogue One is somewhat good, although it's not a good substitute for Dark Forces, it stands up as a work of its own.
Lucas embraced the EU in more ways than one. Sure, there was that official statement where he thought they were parallel universes, but to his own fans, he said this:
"It wasn't long after I began writing Star Wars that I realized the story was more than a single film could hold. As the saga of the Skywalkers and Jedi Knights unfolded, I began to see it as a tale that could take nine films to tell-three trilogies-and I realized, in making my way through the back story and after story, that I was really setting out to write the middle story. After Star Wars was released, it became apparent that my story-however many films it took to tell-was only one of thousands that could be told about the characters who inhabit its galaxy. But these were not stories that I was destined to tell. Instead they would spring from the imagination of other writers, inspired by the glimpse of a galaxy that Star Wars provided. Today, it is an amazing, if unexpected legacy of Star Wars that so many gifted writers are contributing new stories to the Saga. This legacy began with Splinter of the Mind's Eye, published less than a year after the release of Star Wars. Written by Alan Dean Foster, a well-known and talented science-fiction author, Splinter was promoted as a further adventure of Luke Skywalker. It hit the bookstores just as I was preparing my own further adventure of Luke in the form of a script entitled The Empire Strikes Back.”
-George Lucas, intro to “Splinter of the Mind’s Eye”
So basically, Lucas, in his own words to his own fans, and not musing in a private interview, talked about how the Expanded Universe characters were in the same galaxy and saga that the movies were. That whole "alternate universe" shit wasn't referring to the actual universe of Star Wars, but more along the lines of how they were made and in a more metaphorical sense instead of a more literal sense. This makes sense, considering that the Lucasarts' hired canon-keeper during Lucas' tenure, Leland Chee, who managed the canon of Star Wars, had most of the Expanded Universe in C-Canon, which is considered canon unless a specific work got booted out. From the mouth of the man himself, Lucas sees the stories of the Expanded Universe as taking place in the same saga, in the same galaxy, as his movies were. Metaphorically, they were separate, because he did his own thing, but in a literal sense, they all belonged in the same Star Wars universe that everyone knew and loved. And when Lucas' own employees like Leland Chee said that most of the Expanded Universe is in the canon, it's in the fucking canon. That's why Disney had to de-canonize them in the first place, because an official member of Lucasarts, as well as statements of Lucas himself, painted the Expanded Universe as canon, and they needed to reverse that.
The Prequels are still canon, right? Well, that just makes things even more of a mess, because the Prequels were shot with the intention that the Expanded Universe was canon. We had Palpatine's battle meditation disrupting the Jedi's powers, we had Windu's Vapaad saving him in a fight against Palpatine while the other Jedi got killed like scrubs, we had Anakin's scar on his face, a parting gift from Assajj Ventress, we had the Republic capital be Coruscant and the Jedi have a Council, just like in the Thrawn novels and Tales of the Jedi books. We had lightsaber-proof metals just like with the Expanded Universe. We had Palpatine seeking immortality, a quest he will have completed before the Dark Empire saga where they show that he was immortal. The movies themselves had to conform to the Expanded Universe, not the other way around. Which goes to show that this whole "Expanded Universe isn't canon" platform is absolute bullshit. Especially when the Prequels themselves made so many winks and nods to the books, comics, and games that made up the general Expanded Universe. You needed to know the Expanded Universe to make sense of everything in the Prequels. Why is Palpatine seeking immortality in the middle of a galactic takeover? Why are there metals that can withstand lightsaber blows? Why can't the Jedi sense Palpatine? Any idiot reading the books or knowing a damn thing about the Expanded Universe can answer these questions rather easily.
Heck, Lucas even shaped the EU with stories like Dark Empire and Force Unleashed. He changed Dark Empire from a story about a Vader impostor using superweapons to scare people to the Emperor respawning like some angry nerd who keeps dying on the NES version of Ninja Gaiden. He made The Force Unleashed as his official bridge between the Prequels and the Originals. It always makes me laugh when the anti-EU Disney fanboys use those two examples as to why the EU is overblown and that its stories don't respect Lucas' wishes, when Lucas literally approved of Dragonball Z-style respawning and fighting, with the Emperor coming back multiple times and with Force-users having powers that can shanghai Star Destroyers from the sky, annihilate armies with blasts of Force energy, or having whole armadas of warships get decimated by storms of dark energies. Quite literally, Lucas didn't try to stem the tide of the EU stories becoming anime-style crazy fragfests, he DROVE the series to that direction.
