I feel like people look at the Star Wars universe and assume it's stagnant, especially the Extended/Legends setting, because everything that's not a hologram seems to be analog - I think they're just not seeing the way the Star Wars galaxy developed.
When you can punch your hyperdrive for 10 seconds and be in the absolute middle of nowhere when you emerge, months of sublight travel away from civilization if you're lucky, you want to know that every single thing on your ship is either incredibly durable, easy to repair, or both. The way I see it, the Star Wars universe just broadly rejects disposable, fragile products of all kinds.
Look at the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon
Buttons, dials, switches, a transparisteel view port, utilitarian and practical analog tech. And if there is a screen in a ship, it looks like this:
Compare this to a real space shuttle:
Buttons, dials, switches, rugged and simple screens. This is stuff meant to survive, and be patched up if needed, in space. Compare this, meanwhile, to Star Trek
I'm no (total) Star Wars fanboy, I love Star Trek thoroughly, I've been rewatching DS9 on-off recently. But look at all those screens. Consider that if the main viewscreen goes down, they're flying by sensors only. TNG-era Trek love, love, loves its touch screens, and as much as that style is distinct and appealing and I'm happy to have it, I find myself thinking: "How many times have those exploded on you?" Meanwhile, the bridge of any given Star Wars ship is pretty much completely intact until it's been physically destroyed by direct fire or damage. The Executor at Endor had a fully-functional, completely orderly bridge up to the point that an A-Wing plowed through the windshield and gravity took over.
Funnily enough, this is one of the few instances where I feel like Star Wars is incredibly grounded as a sci-fantasy franchise - yes, I would rather be on the Falcon than the Enterprise if I was a week out from port, because I know that Solo and Chewie can beat the old girl back into shape if need be because its engineering is as straightforward as sci-fi gets, and as much as I have faith in Geordie and co. it's entirely conceivable that they just don't have what they need to fix whatever damage comes along and we're left stranded for potentially days, weeks longer.
Sometimes it feels like people are calling a universe with galaxy-wide instantaneous communication, sapient robots available to consumers, planet-shattering weapons on artificial planetoids built in the space of a couple years, and the ability to physically cross the galaxy in days or even hours 'low tech' because they don't have TVs and smartphones, but maybe that's just a Reddit bee in my bonnet.
THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I'VE BEEN SAYING
Consider that if the main viewscreen goes down, they're flying by sensors only.
This might be the worst offense and I picked up on it pretty much immediately when I first discovered Star Trek. The entire Mutara Nebula battle where everyone on the Enterprise is just glued to a screen that's glitching like an eighties television with a bad antenna, desperately hoping to catch something? They could've done so much better simply by having a couple of astronauts step outside the ship and scan the nebula with their own two eyes. Or, hear me out, AN ACTUAL Q-DAMNED VIEWPORT.
Sometimes it feels like people are calling a universe with galaxy-wide instantaneous communication, sapient robots available to consumers, planet-shattering weapons on artificial planetoids built in the space of a couple years, and the ability to physically cross the galaxy in days or even hours 'low tech' because they don't have TVs and smartphones, but maybe that's just a Reddit bee in my bonnet.
To be fair, some of that is substantive too - Star Wars and Star Trek are just such different universes, and part of that shows up in the different levels of advancement. Star Wars is undoubtedly more hi-tech than Star Trek if only because their FTL drives are much faster and their droids are at a level that the Star Trek galaxy is only beginning to reach with things like Commander Data. But Star Trek is undoubtedly more hi-tech in that they've discovered teleportation and time-travel, not to mention the ability to entirely remake a planet from something that looks like the moon to something that looks like Earth. They've both got their pluses and minuses.
(Then again, the fact that Star Wars doesn't have those three things is also part of why it does feel more like hard science).
