Former USAF JAG here (lawyer). I was always a tech geek, undergrad major was in MIS actually, but I didn't enjoy coding. Always ran Plex on the side, built my own computers, etc. Grew up with my Dad using Linux everywhere (I found this annoying as I just wanted to play games on Windows).
I didn't enjoy law (surprise!). I was disillusioned with the criminal justice system too. Quit the law in 2020. Then suddenly had quality time by global happenstance to rethink my life path.
I work in IT now. Restarted at the bottom of a new career but I'm in deep nerd territory now - Proxmox servers, Home Assistant, networks with VLANs, OPNsense router, 22U server rack, Linux as my daily driver, etc.
Much happier now.
Yes. As far as I'm concerned, with notable exceptions of stuff like Andor (this is AMAZING), the real Star Wars story is the pre-Disney EU, which was, contrary to popular refrain, fairly consistent once they got the "keeper of the Holocron" to make sure the stories were relatively cohesive and didn't contradict one-another.
A bunch of the authors even worked to retcon-remove the Dark Empire storyline with the reborn Emperor in their various series by referring to that as "mere rumors" and whatnot.
That's not to say the entire EU was marvelous. But I read the vast majority of it - overall it entirely eclipses what Disney has been doing in terms of quality and depth. Not to mention...Disney, with their tabula rasa, still have stories contradicting one another and introducing inconsistencies...
For me, Disney's Episodes 7-9 never happened. I consume and recognize anything that doesn't materially contradict the prior EU - I'm O.K. with smoothing over, explaining away, and massaging stuff to make it work. But "Kylo Ren" is a dollar store knock-off of Darth Caedus.