It only exists so JJ Abrahams could have his different look and take on the franchise.
No, as I mentioned before, that impetus came from Paramount. The perception at the time was that Trek suffered from franchise fatigue, that the old fanbase had lost interest, as evidenced by the underperformance of
Star Trek Nemesis and
Enterprise. The studio felt that the franchise needed to be relaunched and reworked into something more fresh, exciting, and appealing to mass audiences. J.J. Abrams was simply the person they chose to do that for them, because they liked what he'd done with their
Mission: Impossible franchise. Any other filmmaker they'd given the job to would have done the same, because that was how the job was defined going in.
At least the original Trek universe survived JJ. When JJ went over to that other Star franchise, the original Star Wars universe as fans knew it did not survive (even the Ewok movies and the original 2003 Clone Wars were purged from the canon).
First off, that's inaccurate, because only the non-canonical supplementary material was overwritten, not the core movies themselves. (And yes, the Expanded Universe was non-canonical, despite claims otherwise. Even before the EU was ended, there were multiple instances where its conjectures were contradicted by new canon, e.g. when Karen Traviss's Mandalorian books were ignored by
The Clone Wars.)
Second, as above, that was the studio's decision, and Abrams was simply the person chosen to carry it out. As I mentioned before, Abrams had far
less creative control on
Star Wars than he did on ST. On ST, he was free to create a whole new interpretation from scratch; on SW, he was working with Lawrence Kasdan and Kathleen Kennedy to create something that fit into the existing screen canon, with Kennedy as the ultimate decision-maker.
The one real commonality is that both decisions were motivated by the filmmakers' choice to cover ground that had been covered before. Bad Robot decided to revisit the original TOS crew a decade before TOS, so it made sense to do an alternate version of them so the films' storytelling wouldn't be straitjacketed by TOS continuity. Lucasfilm decided to do a sequel to the original SW trilogy, so it made sense to disregard the novels' and comics' take on that same time period and subject matter so the films' storytelling wouldn't be straitjacketed by what the EU had done. It's simply about having creative freedom.
I understand they probably couldn't make the new SW movies fit similarly BUT the other material--that introduction that George wrote was to Shatterpoint, and what was the first thing the new canon did? Made sure Shatterpoint couldn't fit in the new universe with a mention of a non-comatose Depa Billaba in the first new SW canon book 'A New Dawn'. And the deep, story-based, film-based reasons for this? A few mentions of Depa in the cartoon Rebels that would've had no major difference if the name Depa had been dubbed over as Eeth Koth instead.
I'm sorry, but anyone who actually believed the old EU was ever respected by screen canon was simply not paying attention. It was repeatedly contradicted by the prequels and animated series, and the publishers just adapted to the changes and pretended it all still fit. But Lucas was on record as saying that he did
not consider the EU canonical or binding in any way. It was never more than a marketing tactic on the publishers' part to claim the EU comics and books were canonical, and frankly I always considered it a dishonest tactic, because it was obvious that they were just as prone to contradiction as the non-canonical tie-ins to
Star Trek or most anything else.
