Talking About 'Star Wars': Why has Disney-owned Lucasfilm focused so much attention towards the time before Star Wars: Episode IV with all of their spin-off material?

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On Quora, Mike Austin asks:

Why has Disney-owned Lucasfilm focused so much attention towards the time before Star Wars: Episode IV with all of their spin-off material?
And here's my reply: 
That’s not entirely accurate. But we’ll get to that in a bit.
I’m not an employee at Lucasfilm Ltd., the folks at the creative end, nor am I privy to the corporate doings at The Walt Disney Company (other than those that we know about from reports in the media). Thus, any answer I give is purely speculative, though it’s based on observation of how the franchise has evolved since 1977.
I think that Lucasfilm has chosen to focus on the period that leads up to the Galactic Civil War and the Battle of Yavin because, for many fans, that is Star Wars. The Rebel Alliance’s conflict against Emperor Palpatine’s New Order is what the Generation of 1977 grew up/grew old with, and even though the non-canonical Expanded Universe told one possible version of the aftermath of the Empire’s defeat at Endor and followed Luke, Leia, Han, and the droids for several decades after the end of the war, the period depicted in the Original Trilogy is the core of the franchise.


Lucasfilm’s official canon (the Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and now the Sequel Trilogy and the post-Endor TV series (Resistance and The Mandalorian) tell the before-and-after stories, even though the Prequels aren’t as well-written as the Classic Trilogy (not that those films are Shakespeare great, either), and the Sequel Trilogy has alienated many fans who are enamored of the old (but non-canonical) Expanded Universe lore. (And in the EU faction there are fans who say, point-blank, that to them those ancillary stories are the canon of Star Wars as far as they’re concerned.)


Still, by and large, the Original Trilogy (A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi) contains by far the most popular of the 12 theatrically-released films. As a result, The Walt Disney Company and Lucasfilm try really hard to tell new stories with new characters and situations that are still linked intimately with the Rebellion era.
That’s not to say that Lucasfilm overlooks the other time periods that we’ve seen in the films. George Lucas and Dave Filoni’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars is part of the Prequel era; Filoni’s Lucasfilm Animation is reviving that series for a seventh season on Disney’s new streaming service. Several of the new (and canonical) novels (E.K. Johnston’s Queen’s Shadow; Claudia Gray’s Master and Apprentice, and a novel about Count Dooku’s fall to the Dark Side) are set in the Fall of the Republic timeline, and even Star Wars Rebels and Solo: A Star Wars Story are a bridge between Revenge of the Sith and the events in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and A New Hope.

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