Yeah, Luke/Leia/Han, I'm there in half a heartbeat.

There's a lot of story untold in the time (years?) between the movies. Luke's character growth for instance, largely happens off-screen. He's a greenhorn in ANH, on a quest to learn what it means to be a Jedi in ESB and there's a huge change that happens before ROTJ, when he suddenly appears pretty much as a mature Jedi. I'd love to see the process of that transformation someday. Plus, what happens post-ROTJ?
What made the OT great is the ingenious way Lucas went back to the old space-opera traditions of breezy epic adventure, but provided a new element derived from the New Age ideas springing up in the 70s, combining Buddhist and eco-hippie concepts to create a mythology around the Jedi and the Force.
The fact that he didn't have a huge budget to play with was a limiting factor. It certainly wasn't what made
Star Wars so memorable. Plenty of sci fi movies and TV series have come and gone that were made on a shoestring.
Star Wars is just like
Star Trek in that the key to success is to recognize what makes them unique, and then build stories around that unique identity. Without that, you end up with empty mush, which we've seen from both franchises.
I just saw McCallum's interview. The part where he discusses the problems in the TV industry is interesting. He's definitely right that the whole form of TV is now in flux, and everyone is grasping around for a solution. Here's something that he might want to look at as a potential model (but again, probably works best with animation):
Yahoo's Electric City concept.
Since a big part of this concept is social media/fandom creating buzz around the concept and becoming a virtuous cycle (I guess), it would make more sense to try this with an existing franchise like
Star Trek or
Star Wars vs trying to bootstrap a whole new one, where it might fail because the content is not grabby enough, and then the form will be blamed unfairly for the failure.