Re: the whole issue of how to make a Star Wars film when you can't use dudes in white armor and Jedi in brown robes and have an Empire and a Rebellion.
It can absolutely be done, but it requires people to think beyond their preconceptions of what Star Wars "is." To me, Star Wars is more than just the look of the OT. You want your tech to be...informed by what we see in the OT, but not beholden to it. So, yeah, you'd probably see blasters. But maybe they sport a lot more wood furniture or look more ornate or whathaveyou. Consider how different TPM looked. For all the crap that movie gets and deserves, you can't knock the production design. It is unimistakeably Star Wars, and yet none of it looks anything like what we see in the OT.
There are tech level issues that are a concern, but I think what matters more is that Naboo and everything about it comes across as more ornate and focused on beauty, rather than practical and focused on utility. You could play with those sliders with your production design and do just fine, as long as you maintain the concepts of things like blasters and hyperspace travel.
The Old Republic comics do a pretty good job of this with lightsabres still being lightsabres, but also looking quite different from the OT and PT stuff we see. Starships are still starships, but they aren't knock-off X-wings or TIE fighters. They typically bulkier, featuring antennae and what I can only guess are heat sinks/fins and such.
Star Wars can and must expand beyond the confines of the OT and stuff that mimics it. You can still tell stories within that milieu and set them in far-flung corners of the galaxy, focused on things other than the Galactic Civil War (one reason I loved Solo and wish there were more films coming in that series). But you can also do that in the Old Republic era at any number of points, or make up entirely new history for the universe.
