There's probably a
lot of long history involved, but I'd guess a big part of it amounts to Hidalgo is not an outlier when it comes to get paid to work on Star Wars compared to--say--people like "James SA Corey." And can we honestly say that the past two decades have seen a lot of good feelings between Hidalgo's brand of fandom and folks who care about suspension of disbelief?
Rumor has it Saxton cut ties with Lucasfilm years ago because they didn't concede the point about the "Endor Holocaust." In 2004, Hidalgo gleedfully reports that the entire notion is dead as far as his story group is concerned:
Don't buy into anti-Ewok propaganda. It sounds like the Empire's behind that particular rumor.
Though many learned scholars and students of physics have micro-examined the Star Wars films
for scientific accuracy and have come away with an entertaining degree of consistency, in some cases,
science has to be thrown out the window. Armchair physicists have to look away when a screaming TIE
fighter passes through the vacuum of space, when a particularly volatile explosion combusts in an airless
void, or when giant yellow letters inexplicable to the known rules of the universe float lazily into infinity.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's only a movie.
And it's a movie with a happy ending. Though there are undoubtedly any number of physical
models that would indicate that the detonation of a moon-sized object in the upper atmosphere of a forest
planetoid would wreak untold havoc on the local ecology, that's not what happens. It was George Lucas'
intent that the fuzzy little Ewoks and their Rebel friends lived happily ever after, and nuclear winters don't
fit into his model.
But there is a pseudorational explanation -- from an unlikely source: In The Glove of Darth
Vader, a children's book published in the early 1990s, is a description of a wormhole that opened up
during the Death Star's fiery demise and sucked debris -- including Darth Vader's indestructible glove
(yeah, you read that correctly) -- all the way across the galaxy to the planet Mon Calamari.
If we accept the hazy rules of hypermatter quasi-physics and plot-convenient wormhole, then
surely suggesting that the worst of the Death Star fallout also got sucked out into hyperspace isn't too
much of a stretch. [emphasis added]
Source
He sort of has a point about "happy ending." Don't think anyone at Lucasfilm seriously entertained slaughtering the Ewoks at the time or beforehand. Does anyone think Lucas would've gone for it? But as reasonable an extrapolation from the evidence it was, it might've been more productive to come up with at least a plausible way to
save the Ewoks than leave it to Hidalgo to reason on his own. May have also ensured that there was a voice of reason left to temper some of his other notions (i.e., a bunch of technobabble regarding why we see Starkiller Base firing from the other side of the galaxy).
