It's a miracle they managed to maintain it at this level, Star Trek embraced every aspect of its design even going back to cement the 1960's look as canon in DS9. All that was completely tossed overboard in the new series and they just redesigned everything. Star Wars escaped that horrible fate, they more or less kept the old stuff. Take the Solo trailer, it must have really put some of the designers through hell to have to accurately replicate design work dating back to the 1970's instead of being the freedom to unleash their awesome creative powers and change everything !
Everybody takes for granted that Star Wars is ever going to be more of the same, but it's a miracle they didn't completely break away from the old as they have done with every possible other property you can name.
My wife and I started watching Star Trek: Beyond (a.k.a. Star Trek: Beeyond) this past weekend. We turned it off after about, oh, maybe 40 min? An hour? Mostly because we just didn't care. And actually, it was my wife who had just...grown bored with the film. She said "This is kind of boring. We can turn it off if you want." And I, already being bored with it, said "Yeah, let's just watch an episode of Black Lightning instead" (which, side note, is actually pretty damn good).
My reaction to the film, which she agreed with, was that it was just sort of a generic space action movie. Stuff blows up all over, and I just...didn't really care. Nothing about it said "Star Trek" to me, except for some very minor visual aspects like the 1960s-inspired uniforms, and the characters' names and some behavioral traits. The rest of it? Totally generic. It was a hollowed-out Trek with no real soul to it.
This doesn't really bother me, mind you. I have the original series on blu-ray (and tend to watch without the CGI updates), and I can always pop on TNG or DS9 or whatever on some streaming service if I want it. But the new movies are just big action movies with a thin Star Trek veneer, like someone snapped a Star Trek communicator case around an iPhone.
That Star Wars hasn't gone this route is rather a miracle. But it does need to evolve some, and I think the recent movies have done that. For these franchises to survive long-term, they cannot remain frozen in amber, endlessly retreading what worked before. I think they're doing that (so far), although Solo is still rather a wild card.
As for how the films are being made, Disney is not really the culprit in this, they have a fairly hands-off approach in that they quickly realized that they suck terribly when trying to make movies under their own name, and have taken the habit of buying up companies that are known quantities like Pixar, Marvel and LFL to do all the heavy lifting for them. Disney they comes around once a year to collect the dividend. Marvel and Pixar are prime examples that it works very well if the team they bought has the right people. In the case of Lucasfim, they bought a hot property and not necessarily a good team, which is now becoming increasingly clear. Remember that Star Wars was until recently very heavily centered around Lucas himself. You couldn't do a sketch or it would have to be approved by the man himself and he surrounded himself with people who were good at deferring to him as the central authority in ever matter. Now that the big man is gone they have no plan, no vision and just randomly hire people and give them every opportunity to do whatever they want without any real oversight.
I absolutely think they have a plan, but it's not a plan the way Marvel has plans. It's a more overarching vision of the general direction they want to take the franchise, the audiences they want to bring in, and the general types of stories they want to tell. They're willing to take chances, too, but only so far. Rogue One went over budget with its shooting, and they had a ton of footage that they put together to finish the film, which could have ended differently, apparently. The directors of Solo were fired because they made a product that was TOO different from LFL's vision. But they were also willing to give Rian Johnson room to run on Ep. VIII, and to take things in a different direction.
So far, I like the direction, although I recognize that I'm in the minority on this thread in that regard.
I think LFL's vision/plan is that they're going to focus on different types of stories or genres, and merge Star Wars with those things. A war story. A heist film. A western. Whatever. They're going to try to appeal to an ever-wider audience by giving everyone something they can get into. I expect a bit more appeal to this or that niche, to some degree, in terms of the genres made.
There's probably also a view towards expanding the scope of characters and settings in which to tell Star Wars stories. So, a film like Solo could act as a launch point for films about, say, Emilia Clarke's character or whomever. Or they may do films about young Han Solo before he really joins the Rebellion. I think that Rogue One's success makes it more likely that they'll focus on characters who aren't directly connected to the "big" names in the stories, and which take full advantage of the setting. Mostly, I think that these early "Star Wars Stories" are efforts to shift the story farther and farther away from the OT era, or at least the OT characters and events, and widen the scope of the universe. However, Disney's approach to doing that recognizes that they have to gradually lead audiences there. So, Rogue One is a story about totally unfamiliar characters doing very different things from our usual heroes, but all of which revolves around stealing the Death Star plans. Solo is a story all about Star Wars' underworld and Imperial recruitment centers, and whatnot, but it's all given a touchstone of Solo himself (and Chewie and Lando).
And sure, it's tempting to say "Oh, there's no plan and they're just recycling old stuff." But look at what they're also doing: they're moving away from the big episode settings and out into the fringes of the Star Wars story. They're just doing it with stuff that's already familiar. If they want the franchise to continue to grow, rather than perpetually gaze into its own past and reexamine itself (which I think they do), they'll probably gradually give us "touchpoints" that are farther and farther away from the original core material, all while retaining the core elements of the setting.
I'm not saying Johnson is bad, I do like the idea of subverting the expectations made by Abrams because I feel that trying to make Ray a Kenobi or a Skywalker/Solo or even a reincarnated Annakin or a gestalt of former Jedi masters would have missed the point and by making Rey strong in the force but without the burden and the incestuous obsession that a Galaxy with a potential cast of quadrillions must be dominated by the same group of related people for all perpetuity.
Johnson's ideas were original, the execution was poor at best, you're not doing a good job if you need a manual to understand what you see on screen, better writing and tighter direction and editing would have gone a long way to fix most of the problems.
I dunno. I felt like I understood it just fine. And I liked it a lot. I liked it because it was different. I think the central conflict of ideologies is one of wanting to completely destroy the past to move forward, versus moving forward while still acknowledging and retaining aspects of the past that were good (and discarding what wasn't). What it's
not, however, is slavish devotion to recreating a past, ostensibly out of reverence for it, but more out of a kind of myopic view of the past and present, and with no real view of the future.