>>92898018The old EU, just like the new one, had plenty of both good and bad, and a lot of it comes down to subjective tastes, so it's not worth arguing about. However, the problem was that overall it was a clusterfuck, a huge mess which, while some good authors tried to upkeep and organize, others only fucked up further. As a result, you had tons of contradictions (there was literally a dozen of different accounts on how the rebels stole the Death Star plans), half the characters and their grandmother turned out to be Force-sensitives who either used to be Jedi or would go on to be trained as Jedi (despite being well into adulthood) or in other way extraordinary, alien species were stereotyped (every Hutt must look like Jabba and every Twi'lek must look like Bib), etc. Not to mention endless Luuuukes and over-the-top superweapons. And it all got so vast and uncontrolled that a lot of it just didn't spiritually and thematically fit with the original movies anymore: you got pretty controversial things like the Vong or Gray Jedi, and while, again, it all comes down to personal preferences, this isn't what Star Wars is supposed to be like, and that's why a lot of people shit on these concepts. I've read a fair amount of the old EU, and I really enjoyed most of it, but looking back at it now I'm glad they decided to take it down and start anew, with the idea of coherence, a story group and everything.
Their big mistake, however, was giving their very first new movie to JJ and giving him too much freedom. Not wanting to take risks or acknowledge that anything but the OT exists, he went for the blandest carbon copy of ANH possible, at the same time rendering the finale of the OT pointless (Luke is a failure and the rebel victory over the Empire doesn't matter), and outright shitting on the story group, almost creating continuity errors in the very first sequel movie. TLJ and the new EU stories are now doing damage control, but what's done is done.
