Yeah, as a whole the old EU novels painted a much grimmer future for Star Wars: over three decades of near constant repeating cycles of war, political corruption and next to no progress on Luke's whole "passing on what he has learned" thing.
Then, just when everyone seemed to *start* to get their shit together a massive galaxy wide invasion by endless legions of alien vampire S&M religious fanatics wipe out whole swaths of the galaxy, and the fledgling Jedi are back to essentially being Generals and lightsaber wielding commandos....which is exactly what they're *not* supposed to be (see: The Clone Wars!)
But once that's sorted, the whole galaxy seems to magically revert to what it was before, sans some hand-wavey mentions of "rebuilding", which last exactly five seconds before it all goes to shit again.
Several bouts of resurgent Sith, a former Imperial war criminal randomly elected president of the galaxy (or whatever they call it!), Jedi resorting to assassination, the Republic basically reverting back into the Empire and some nonsense about an all powerful being randomly making Jedi go coo-coo for cocoa puffs. After all that, I'd call ending the EU a mercy killing.
I can't help find it amusing that a lot of the fans currently whinging about TLJ are the same ones who whinged about the "loss" of the EU (as if it was every meant to be canon to begin with!) Also pretty bizarre that the very same ones complaining that TLJ changed too much were the ones crying about TFA being a direct ripp-off of ANH.
Or if you're Kerr Avon and going nuts on the privateer cargo ship Scorpio... 
