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I have a bit more of a radical view of this...

Copyright has become a tool to enforce privatization of culture, which is a pretty modern take—and, obviously, it's just another example of the ongoing attempts to squeeze every last possible dollar out of everything and everyone. Culture is supposed to belong to us, it's supposed to be our culture.

Another way of looking at this is that absurd choice of word, "canon." This is a religious term, for what a particular religious establishment accepts as the Truth, from among all the spiritual and theological writings a particular religious tradition has produced. But why does the Pope have the right to choose which stories are True? And why does Disney have the right to choose which stories are True?

This is one of the subtler reasons that Star Trek is so much better: while there is still a Star Trek Canon, that canon was massively diversified by their spec script policy (back in the days that Star Trek was still worth watching).

Anyway, this is also why fanfiction is such a big thing.

There's a balance to be had. I would be mad if, say, one novel had Ahsoka listed as a former Jedi. And the next has her as a failed Jedi. And the next as a member of the Jedi order, trying to rebuild it from the inside. As long as the related works agree with themselves enough that you aren't confused with what's going on, it's probably okay.

I agree with you. If you find enjoyment in that part of the fiction, indulge in it. Who cares if it’s not officially canon. There’s still merit to those stories.

I think the larger issue at play is the inability to allow a story or properly to just end. If the companies refuse to allow their IP's to die gracefully, then they will inevitably come to be ugly deformations of their former selves.

We don't need a thousand new entries in Marvel, or Star Wars, or any intellectual property. You very quickly hit a threshold where you just water down the themes, messages, and ideas present within a story; rather than expand upon it.

[Goofy joke] Sorry, but your rejection of the importance of canon has been retconned out ;P

IME, Star Wars fans are less a fan of the movies, and more a fan of the toys they played with when they were kids.

It doesn't really matter what is or isn't canon, because they only want to revel in their nostolgia-informed headcanon.

This is quite different from, say, nerds you'd meet at a Ren-faire. They are either fans of high fantasy, which everyone agrees is entirely made up and headcanon, or fans of era-specific historical study which is an extremely large corpus of culture and literature and artifacts that is virtually unending.

IMO, with star wars, the fandom could really do better job of emulating and embracing the first group. Just try to have fun and stop worrying about canon. If you try to obess about minutia, you're going to have to pick something with a wider breadth than a specific disney IP cobbled together by many different people over many decades which ix going to be inhearently a mess.