I was just coming here to post this story. Personally I am hoping that episode 7 will be about the Thrawn trilogy. (But that is because I am a Timothy Zahn fanboy.)
At the moment it is impossible to say how good/bad the new movie(s) will be, but the thing about Star wars and other such fictions which have spread to books, movies, games, series and cooking appliances is that the quality will vary greatly. (And I do mean that this applies to Star trek and Warhammer and Warcraft and more.)
Sometimes the new product is just trying to cash some few extra pennies out of die hard fans, sometimes it really is good. The problem is the unreliability which increases proportionally with the money used in the project. They can hire an inexperienced writer to make a new EU book, print a small first edition to see if the fans like it (Some fools will buy it anyway so the risk is low) if really is a good book, true to the background and loved by all they can print more. But when they are spending millions to make a new movie... You would think that they would make sure this is a good movie to improve their odds of getting their investment back, but it is more likely that they play it safe and make a generic, hollywood scifi with as much executive meddling as possible. I bet there is already a producer demanding that they add something like Jar Jar to the movie to attract the kids. Maybe just treat the movie as a huge commercial to the new product lines.
Hmm... I keep sounding more pessimistic the longer I type... Still, it might be good and it really is too early to say how it will turn out. (Getting some restrictions to Lucas would be a good start.)
