This drives me nuts, too.
Starships are expensive. Colony worlds are expensive. Trained personnel are extremely expensive, because when you lose some of those their relatives start yelling, and then governments use the excuse to start yelling, and now it’s an entire thing.
Big Honking Guns are cheap. My megacorps in GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND would rather patch bullet holes than replace entire orbital stations. They’ve run studies. It’s just plain good business sense, really.
#commissionearned
The same guys running the Disney “try to get out of a wrongful death suite by invoking the terms of a free trial of Disney+” gambit are running that cost benefit analysis. I.e., they aren’t very bright, but have been promoted way above their pay grade and told they are supergeniuses.
In my headcanon, there are only two movies. So the issue doesn’t come up.
I have vague memories of seeing a couple bad movies that claimed to be from the same franchise, but like The Phantom Menace, I’m content to classify those memories as fever dreams. If it’s not real, it can’t hurt me.