That’s exactly what happened in the NPR dramatization; there’s a brief scene in which Luke is tested in a flight simulator before being cleared for pilot duty. It was a nice solution since it went a little beyond “Biggs vouches for him.”
Why have slaves when you have droids?
You can make the case that droids as presented in the Star Wars Universe are slaves.
The cantina bartender’s line, “We don’t serve their kind in here,” certainly could be interpreted that way.
Star Wars shows the difficulty of imagining the future-it is an odd mix of medieval and futuristic themes. The human society has FTL travel, and immensely powerful technology-but people still live on farms (like Luke’s foster parents). I also liked the WWII-style anti-aircraft guns (how did the fire into space)? And the idea of human fighter pilots is pretty strange-. The real problem is with the “DeathStar”-why would the empire need such a machine? they could easily suppress the rebels using mind control or drugs.
Or, y’know, past.
“A long time ago,” as a matter of fact…