The problem is that people view Star Wars as sci-fi, or even hard sci-fi, when it's a fairy tale pure and simple. If you're looking for a logical development of technology, then you're going to need to look elsewhere.
That's true. But mainly I just wanted to call attention to the unexamined assumption that continuing technological progress is a universal norm, and that technological stability is somehow an aberration that needs to be explained. We tend to think that way because we've lived in a state of rapid progress all our lives and our society has been in one for centuries, so it's easy to assume that's the way things have always been and always will be. But a few centuries is a very short time in the grand sweep of history, let alone the entire lifespan of our species. The big-picture reality is that what we've known all our lives may just be a phase society is currently going through, and that phase could eventually come to an end. So while it's true that
Star Wars is a fairy tale in space, it's also true, though largely unrealized, that the premise of a society being technologically stable for thousands of years is not necessarily implausible.
The Death Star is a fairly obvious example of a technological advancement in the Star Wars universe.
In the sense that it's a bigger gun, maybe, but that's hardly an impressive advancement. Building a bigger weapon that has more power packed into it doesn't necessarily constitute a fundamental advance in technology, just a greater allocation of existing resources into weaponry. Heck, if you want to destroy all life on a planet, you can just toss an asteroid at it, or crash a ship into it at a high fraction of lightspeed. Actually disintegrating the entire planet is a ridiculous degree of overkill, when all you really need is to render the surface layer uninhabitable. The Death Star's power was arguably as much about propaganda as technology.
The way Han Solo brags about the Millennium Falcon being able to make "point-five past light speed", it is also suggested that innovations are occurring in the area of hyper-drive motors. Or, at least that's how I always interpreted that.
To me it sounded more like he was bragging about having the most souped-up car around. I mean, the
Falcon is an antiquated, broken-down freighter, not a state-of-the-art ship. In the Imperial Era, I doubt that anyone other than the military is getting state-of-the-art tech; everyone else, particularly the outlaws, would have to settle for more low-grade assembly-line stuff or whatever still-viable Republic-era tech they could scrounge together. It's more likely that Han's boast simply meant that he'd been able to upgrade its engines with the best parts he could beg, borrow, or steal, and make it run as close as possible to the peak of the existing range of ship performance.
By analogy, if a street racer says his ride can do 200 MPH, he's not saying that it represents some fundamental technological breakthrough in automotive propulsion, he's just saying that he's been able to improve its performance to near the upper limits for that existing technology.
