Bottom line is this - Lucas was NEVER the "creative genius" he was cracked up to be.
The success of Star Wars was a mix of luck, and a pool of talent from across all disciplines of the film-maknig process. This is because it germinated at a time when GL had to rely more heavily on others...
Preaching to the choir here, but we all know that the more independent he got, the worse his films were.
But even in the beginning, he was not a creative genius - more like a creative LUNATIC. His ideas leading into SW was voluminous, eecentric, unfilmable, chaotic - I could go on...
Were it not for those around him who corraled his creative lunacy (and at the same time offered their own input) SW would have been a stinking pile of you-know-what, and B-Movie fare at best.
Key elements where GL got lucky, or indirectly relied on - or direclty benefitted from - others:
--Williams ponying up to score the film
--The Huyck's salvaging of the script (at least dialogue) via their script doctoring
--Kurtz's push-back
--The quality of work (eventually) turned in by the nascent ILM
--The rich production design executed into reality by the British film crews
--That Jones agreed to voice Vader
The list goes on... Imagine SW if you took away just ONE of these elements.
Do it now.
Imagine the opening withOUT the most efffective film score of all time, and/or without the stunning effect of the SD coming overhead. What IF Jones passed on doing Vader? Just another deep voice would not have been the same...
Film is a collaborative effort. ALL good films are generally the result of a combination of key ingredients, as described above. I suppose at the time Star Wars was no different.
The difference was that there WAS an ecclectic combination of talent. A good and diverse "gene-pool" of talent that has since dwindled away as GL has taken more and more control over his work.
I give Lucas credit for the film in the same way we give Hitch or any other fine director credit for their movies. Lucas asked for all the elements you mention, controlled them and channelled them into a clear but extremely difficult-to-achieve aim - a return to old-time Hollywood romance. This goal was set by him and him alone. And his chosen method was to go for an unprecedented blending of myth with a whole melting pot of classic film genres - a fascinating innovation, and for me, the reason why Star Wars is his best film in film terms. This course was set by him and he deserves full credit for it.
Remember that most of the crew didn't have a clue what he was trying to do, and he fought many battles to get his ideas over, encountering obstruction and even mockery from the British crew (some of whom took the **** out of Chewbacca and Vader onset). Other accounts speak of John Barry being Lucas' only real supporter through the Tunisian shoot.
As for the Huycks, it was Lucas who hated his own dialogue so he brought them in. How many films did Hitchcock attempt to do dialogue for? None I think, but we still call him a great director, even an auteur. The point is Lucas saw it needed polishing, and had it polished, thus executing perfectly his directorial duty.
As for ILM, you might as well say Kubrick was nowhere without his FX men too, but we never hear that said much. And Lucas stood over those guys. Tons of DS battle shots were cut to specific WW2 footage assembled by Lucas. The moves, the speed of the ships, timings, shot lengths, were all largely pre-ordained by Lucas in his WW2 reel. Lucas possibly also put more into the actual design of his ships than Kubrick, coming up with the initial basic configurations of the TIE, the X-wing, the Falcon, the Death Star etc.
As for Williams, Lucas
asked for a big romantic orchestral score, and the result bears many resemblances to the stuff he'd been using for temp tracks - Stravinsky in the desert scene with the robots for instance. You might as well say Spielberg's clunking shark would've been dead in the water without Williams' famous see-sawing string figure to give it life, but we never hear this said either.
Lucas had also directed two fine films previously. So I kind of object to this characterisation of the director of SW as a confused loon who got lucky. The sheer amount of elements he had to design, work out and budget for in just 3 years is just staggering - as well as writing the script! This was no ordinary movie, and obviously he needed more than a producer's usual level of input and support, hence Kurtz's massive logistical and advisory input. It's an absolute miracle the thing got made at all. But ultimately Lucas was captain of the ship and he steered it home.
Finally, there are loads of artists - musicians, painters, writers - who
didn't have a great team around them, who had a good couple of years then started producing crap. I think Lucas' case is similar. He had an exceptional talent for a few years, then went off.