[Phantasm]

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; I've no idea why it holds true for Star Wars, but there you go. They seem to be incapable, as a society, of any kind of innovation (if the KotOR games are still in canon, that's been true for over four thousand years).

I actually blame the Jedi running the Republic for 2.5 to 3 thousand of those years preventing the innovation, and then they still had influence over the rest of the Republic after the Reformation in 1000 BBY. They encouraged complacency and stagnation, rather than innovation. (Case in point: one of the ships shown in Rogue One, the Hammerhead-class Cruiser, was a KOTOR-era design that had seen 4000 years of continual use.)

There's actually cases of technological regression in play, too, if you take KOTOR and SWTOR being in the exact same timeline as the movies. Show me in a movie where there are conformal force field belts (or wrist units, if the KOTOR mechanics are to be believed), not just the hemispherical ones on the droidekas. Given that the region on the semi-official maps marked "The Colonies" (between the Core Worlds and the Inner Rim) are mostly early mining and industrial colony planets, it's possible that after 20,000 years the mines have been tapped out almost completely.

And don't get me started on why blasters (pistols and rifles alike) canonically have ranges of 30 yards, and sniper blaster rifles 35 yards. Video game engine limitations being touted as canon in the tabletop RPGs and the Essential Guides, which are then echoed in the novels . . . .