I'm actually fine with each of those styles existing thousands of years ago. As I've often said, 25,000 years is a long arse time and there's only so far technology can advance when your *starting point* is already a galaxy stretching civilization. Most of the major advances are going to be in the first few millennia, after what you're actually more likely to see is an ebb and flow of history. Thing get lost. Things get re-discovered. Things go out of fashion. Things are forcibly changed to suit the times.
It's not a straight-line progression from one discovery to another. Just looking at out own history will tell you that.
My problem is with both of those styles co-existing within a few decades of each other. Was *every* spikey asymmetrical ship destroyed in the Sith War or something? Did fashions change so drastically galaxy wide? The difference between the almost decadent prequels and the spartan, overly lived-in OT at least makes sense since the interim featured the rise of an oppressive Empire that actively sought to repress cultural diversity, strip away individualism and grind down vibrant, living worlds for their resources.
There's nothing between TotJ & KoTOR that would account for a similar transition. Those should have been post-war boom years, at least for the core systems, not a galaxy-wide depression.
The disparity between the depiction of the Jedi at least make some sense. In TotJ you have masters spread across the galaxy acting as semi independent martial, each training three or four apprentices at a time, usually starting in adolescence rather than childhood. No mention of a council, just a mass gathering on a certain planet every once in a while. In KoTOR it was pretty much as we saw it in the prequels.
That tracks as we see in TotJ that all across the galaxy, apprentices turned on masters to join the new Sith cult. Mass gatherings of Jedi left them vulnerable to a tactical strike and the architect of it all was an obviously troubled apprentice who was able to basically lie his way into the forbidden sections of the Jedi libraries because there was no central authority to keep track of it all and each Jedi was essentially a law unto themselves.
One could retroactively propose that *this* is why the Jedi became the cloistered order that we saw in TPM. Students would be taken younger and younger to ensure that darkness couldn't settle in their hearts. Masters were permitted only one apprentice at a time to avoid the competition and jealousy that arose within the old cadres and to ensure that each padawan had their Master's full attention. A council was formed to organise the disparate wandering Journeymen & Watchmen of old into a much clearer hierarchy with accountability and the temple on Coruscant established as the true headquarters of the order so that they could be at the direct disposal of the Senate, not hidden away on some ancient backwater.
) I was just pointing out that KoTOR and TotJ have a lot less in common than one might suppose.
