Quality is less important than hiring a fanboy who will work cheap because they're excited to be working on the dumb merchandise driven franchise they treat as a religion to sell copies to people that are going to buy it for the same reasons.
But WHY should cost be an issue? It's fucking Disney.
I don't buy the Comicgate narrative that comics are in decline
because of SJW pandering. I think superhero comics are in decline because it's a dying medium, and pandering is a failing attempt to halt the decline by expanding into other demos, and partially (I hope) to bring in new talent and new ideas. Comics are cheap. Disney keeps writers are artists fed while they generate ideas (some of which may be shit), superfans pay for the privilege of testing these ideas, and then the good stuff is recycled in expensive-to-produce media for the general public.
But Star Wars is
not that. Comics are character-driven, and they've endured generations of reboots, what-ifs, plot holes and retroactive spotfixes. Star Wars is a plot-driven story that had most of its continuity (by volume) wiped on account of allegedly being shit. Disney needed, effectively
promised, to deliver an alternative stable continuity that would not be shit.
Plenty of talented people like Star Wars and would jump at the chance to write for it. And if your best person is not a fan, they're still a professional who can be bought. Get KJ Parker. Lynn Abbey. Ian Watson. Get George Martin if you must, it's not like he's busy.
Put a couple of autistic fans in the room for your writer to bounce the ideas off, and later to comb through the manuscript looking for inconsistencies.
I liked TLJ. Sure, it was trash in most aspects I don't care about and a few I do. But a lot of it was genuinely good. I liked the First Order popping up just like that, the absence of wanking to lineages and backgrounds, Snoke dying like a bitch (even though I wanted to blow my brain out as the scene went on and on), Luke being a failure (I'd have preferred him to heroically die soon after ep. 6, but given they had to put Mark Hamill in the movie, this was the next best thing), the casino subplot with its anti-bougie message and some much needed planetside action. I liked the dangerhair woman - yay, female camaraderie!
Then it turns out the "female camaraderie" in question was most expressed by her trying to persuade Leia to try alien dick, like it was Bad Dragon product placement. Any interest in Star Wars as a story I used to have died there and then. I will not live long enough to see a reboot.
Why does this happen?
Like any "too big to fail" corporation, Disney is crippled by incompetence arising from a culture of corporate bootlicking and upper-middle-class navel-gazing. They don't know
quality and they can't exert
control; they harass licensees but are unwilling to curate a property's presentation internally.
Star Wars is such a notable failure because Disney had never managed a plot-driven property before. Their main artworks for the general audience are expensive (and profitable) standalone movies that are then milked through various transient tie-ins, series, direct to video sequels, etc. marketed directly to children with shit taste. The princesses hang out together in a happily-ever-after dimension. Maleficent has starred in like a dozen different continuities after her death in Sleeping Beauty 60 years ago, including as the hero of her own movie. If there's a book where Belle advises Elsa to go fuck a troll, no one would expect a sequel to Frozen to reference that (and Frozen is rare among Disney movies in that it gets a theatrical sequel at all), and as long as the book makes a profit, all is well.
With Star Wars, whatever you make, it goes right in. The franchise is radioactive now. Pour concrete on it, raise a red flag on the pump and leave it be for ten thousand years.
