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Browsing through Wookiepedia I found a cheerful fellow, Rokur Gepta, Sorcerer of Tund and apparently one of the most powerful Darksiders during Palpatine's reign with his "electromagnetic torpedo" ability of doom. Now I am curious. There is a fairly significative number of high level Darksiders that can destroy a planet or at least seriously damage it.
-We have Palpatine with Force Storms
-We have the aforementioned Rokur Gepta
-Apparently there is a weirdo called Darth Nihilus in the KOTOR era that ate the life force of whole planets
-We have the old Sith lords with the ability to trigger novas (and perhaps other powers)
One wonders how the Jedi survived all this, considering that I know of no instance of a Lightsider developing such powerful abilities.

Murazor wrote:-Apparently there is a weirdo called Darth Nihilus in the KOTOR era that ate the life force of whole planets

It should be noted, though, that though he has the ability to cleanse the life from planets, he becomes pretty pathetic if there is no nearby life for him to feed on. He may have had the power, but he dies if he doesn't constantly use it.

One wonders how the Jedi survived all this, considering that I know of no instance of a Lightsider developing such powerful abilities.

The reason is that Jedi have all sorts of hangups about using the Force in big spectacular displays, since it usually involves stuff like explosions and death. However, they have shown some pretty powerful abilities in the way of being able to counter many of the Sith powers.

Keep in mind that Mace Windu and Yoda both could deflect or reflect lightning. Luke and Leia together were able to disrupt Palpatine's ability to control his Force storms.

And although this is a special and extremely rare case, the Exile could not really be affected by Nihilus' power (though the same is true if the Exile's a Sith). In fact, when Nihilus tried to drain the Exile, it looked like he was nearly crippled by it, since the Exile's connection to the Force was all fucked up by the Mandalorian War.

Any lightsider who developed something that powerful would fall to the dark. Most noteably Mace Windu who developed a powerful fighting style, the style drove him to draw on the darkside. If he had have lived he'd have turned dark. Luke got too powerful and did turn dark, as did a few of his students Kyp Duron most notably.

The comparison one could draw is this...

The Sith are based almost entirely upon attack, but this left them vulnerable to attack themselves, whlile the Jedi seemed based mainly on defense and protection levaing them underwhelming in terms of 'raw power'.

This could easily create a stalemate, if one side can counter all your shit, and you dont have any counters yourself just offensive weapons...you attack, they defend, you attack, they defend, over and over again for millennia.

I gather this is what happened, more often than not. With some exceptions of course, like Mace Windu trying to develop a way to specifically combat the Darkside, for example.

Murazor wrote: One wonders how the Jedi survived all this, considering that I know of no instance of a Lightsider developing such powerful abilities.

When large numbers of Sith exsist, they tend to fight each other for the alpha male spot. Plus, the Jedi are usually a (relatively) large and ordered group, able to respond to threats.