Ozkabot

Around November-ish last year I believe both the UCS Falcon and ISD were on sale for about £100 off each at John Lewis

The huge influx of Prequel sets from 2011 - 2015 were likely a result of the planned 3D re-releases of the Star Wars movies; only TPM had the re-release in the end but it makes sense that Lego would have started putting sets into production a few years in advance.

If there's nothing to communicate outside of 'we can't meet the deadline' then they shouldn't be communicating anything else. They're handling it well; unlike CDP / CDPR who were churning out Cyberpunk 2077 marketing to hype up the audience while the game was being continually delayed as the development team slip further behind schedule, knowing they can't meet the expectations being set by the marketing department. It's also not just the pandemic, they're building this game on a new engine which is a notoriously difficult process that almost always holds up development even in a non-pandemic situation. I can't imagine how difficult it must be developing the game in the current circumstances. I understand you may not be complaining yourself, but it's worth putting this out there because clearly a lot of people need to hear it. What good would it do if they did?

The difference now is that the TV series aren't competing with anything. It made sense for Lego to cheap out on their Rebels set budget in favour of a big The Force Awakens line-up because the latter is obviously going to be more popular, but currently Star Wars movies aren't slated to release until 2023, 2025 and 2027, which gives a good two years where the upcoming series have no competition and can have all of Lego's attention.

This is the way it should be IMO. Quite often playsets end up being too detailed to be affordable for a younger market, but not detailed / accurate enough to be a collectors item. The result was a weird in-between product.

I doubt that had anything to do with it. I'm pretty sure 2012 - 2014 was prequel heavy because Lucasfilm planned on re-releasing every Star Wars movie into theatres in 3D, starting with The Phantom Menace in 2012, and Lego were already working on sets to coincide with these releases. Despite the 3D re-releases being cancelled after TPM, the AOTC and ROTS sets still got their same release dates in 2013 and 2014 respectively. The strange thing is that TPM's sets seemed to have been pushed into 2015. Perhaps they couldn't afford to fit them into an already crowded 2012 wave and releasing them 2013 would consistently put Lego a year behind the 3D releases, so they had them on hold until there was a release schedule empty enough to accommodate them.

I'm genuinely impressed by the new X-Wing. In fact, I may even prefer it to the 2018 version! For all of 2018's details, 2021 is far sleeker and the wings seem more proportional too. Considering 2018 was a little oversized, any thoughts on whether this could actually be minifig scale? TIE Fighter looks great too too. 2018 version in this case definitely seems more proportional, but there's something nice about this new scale that looks better with minifigs. Again, thoughts on how close this could be to minifig scale? I honestly love this new direction. A £60 TIE Fighter and a £90 X-Wing that are intended as playsets and not UCS style sets is ridiculous. I hope we see a genuine soft-reboot of the Star Wars line and see some prequel era ships revisited in this manner too.

Those who've already got their hands on and built the Cantina, how long would you say the build time was?

I'm undecided on the Cantina. I can see the value of the set overall; A lot of minifigs and a decent section of Mos Eisely on display. I'm just disappointed that the inside of the cantina looks a little bare and repetitive (the latter of which is admittedly kind of a given with the source material). I can't help but wish they'd made the cantina itself a little bigger and spent their entire parts budget on cramming as many details as possible into it as opposed to these extra side builds.