We did the same thing in the lead-up to Tarkin, and the plan at first was to keep the practice going with each new release, as the “survivors” continued to accumulate…but then we started actually reading Tarkin. As our respective lists crept into the range of one hundred entries—including literally dozens of EU planets, and in some cases weird situations where the Bilbringi Shipyards, say, were canon but not necessarily the planet Bilbringi itself—it started to appear that maybe a new paradigm was needed.

[...]

Just looking at the galactic map alone, we’ve got, again, dozens of surviving planets (and/or systems, and/or sectors), plus the Unknown Regions, plus the Perlemian, Hydian, Rimma, and Triellus hyperlanes, and as least the general outline of the preexisting Core/Expansion/Rim geographic dynamics; at a certain point it’s hard not to conclude that the canon galactic map is effectively (if not completely) the same.

And if the map is the same, for all intents and purposes, it’s the same universe. This is not a wholly new Galaxy Far, Far Away with elements from the EU peppered in; this is the EU GFFA, plain and simple.

Ultimately we’re still in a weird place. The infrastructure of the EU is probably there, but invisible. The histories and stories are more up in the air, and the closer they’re intertwined the fewer assumptions we can make. For now we have to wait and see: once the movies start coming out, we can imagine that there will be a lot more story being pinned down and solidified than right now.

It’s time for EU fans to shift their perspective away from checklists and onto the potential for exciting new versions of familiar EU elements—and maybe even stories. A Rogue Squadron TV series, for example, would never have matched perfectly with the continuity of the book series; but now that there’s no need to, the potential for such a show to exist—and be extensively informed by the books just the same—is actually way higher. Isn’t that worthy of our optimism?