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Originally Posted by Irish Wolf
It's a cultural issue, however. Some cultures really do stagnate, declining to learn or discover anything truly new. Usually in the real world, there's some reason for this, however stupid it may be;
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Actually, it's more the other way around. In real history,
most cultures, most of the time, change slowly and advance slowly. The 'fast' periods, like the Hellenistic era or recent times, are the historical exception.
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I've no idea why it holds true for Star Wars, but there you go.
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The Old Republic looks suspiciously like a 'stable state' empire, the sort of state that often emerges late in a civilization's span, kind of like the Roman Empire on a vastly larger scale. It's big, slow, ponderous, most of the ideas that come naturally to its dominant culture have been explored, but its very presence tends to suppress new cultures and new ways of looking at things.
Probably the Old Republic would, in the natural course of events, have fallen apart ages before, but it had the Jedi who could head off shocks that would knock it down, so it just endured, old and tired and fossilized.