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The Star Wars Extended Universe was officially canon until Disney, which I always thought was a mistake. Secondary material like that can become a bit of a ball-and-chain. Disney made the right choice by distching it - you can't expect movie goers to know 30 years worth of events that happened since Return of the Jedi, you aren't going to be able to explain everyhing in the opening crawl, and the actors are all too old to pick up from there. I'm not necessarily happy with the way they took it, but I think they made the right call to ignore the extended universe.
I'm quite happy with a flexible reality where things are free to reinvent themselves and disregard inconvenient bits of the past. I think my favourite reboot strategy is where they acknowledge the past but aren't bound by it, like the start of the new Battlestar Galactica, or the bits in the first episode of Buffy that seem to be referring to the film but actually aren't, or the pick-and-choose attitude of Doctor Who.
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