That’s an excellent point. In the '70s and early '80s, Lucas (mostly) didn’t have children of his own (he and then-wife Marcia adopted a daughter in '81).
By the time he was working on the Prequels (and fiddling with the Special Editions), he had three children, and he commented, at that time, that they were a significant influence on him as he was developing the Prequels.
Stick with me, baby. 
When I saw the first episode on Sept 8, 1966, I had just begun my senior year of high school. I fell in love with Spock the moment I laid eyes on him. Sadly, I have always been drawn to the aloof, taciturn, smart, nerdy guy who is also sad and tortured. (Before him, it was Sherlock Holmes.) I was besotted with Spock and with the show. It took the rest of the world awhile to catch up.
Never could stand Kirk. Cocky, full of himself, thinks he’s God’s gift to women. Supposedly he was modeled (somewhat) after Horatio Hornblower, but I’ve read all those books (BTW the late 90s TV series was quite good – I have the boxed set), and Hornblower was brilliant but also humble and consumed with self-doubt. THAT’S appealing, namely, the wounded hero, not a posturing blowhard. I’ve always said that I don’t mind a guy being cocky, as long as he has something to be cocky about.
And a charlatan. That’s why he didn’t know what a parsec is. Everything he said in his first couple scenes was bullshit.
He wasn’t that way in the early episodes. He was written as being “married to his ship”. Note how Eve McHuron and Lenore Karidian react: Eve can’t figure out why Kirk isn’t falling for her, and Kirk only woos Lenore to get information about her father.
But he’s not. He really can pilot the ship, he does the astronavigation (Rastroravigation?), he knows how to repair the ship. Chewie is clearly the co-pilot, though I suspect he’s the better mechanic.
I used to think he was just ignorant and all bluff and hot air, but I changed my mind.
Does he? IIRC, we never see him at the helm of the Falcon without Chewie, but we do see him leave the controls to Chewie while he climbs into one of the gun pods when they’re escaping the DS. In Empire, he significantly can’t fix the Falcon. He needs the techs on Cloud City to figure out what’s wrong with his hyperdrive. And I’m not sure any human does astrogation in the SW universe? Luke has R2 to do it when he’s in an X-Wing. Han, I’m pretty sure, has the onboard computer to do it for him in the Falcon. I don’t think it involves any more effort from him than saying, “Chart a course for the X system” and letting the computer do the work.
Mind, I prefer Han being a competent pilot etc, over the “clearly incompetent blowhard” explanation suggested by his introductory scene, but I don’t think they ever actually establish that he’s any good at any of the technical aspects of his job.
To me, poking holes is enjoying them and the memories they invoke. I’m laughing at myself as much a anything. Rewriting how “I woulda done it” is investing my creativity into the universe. It’s once again playing with my action figures, creating my own adventures.
Yes. He’s a smuggler and he works for Jabba the Hutt. We don’t even know what he was smuggling when he had to drop his load before being boarded by the Imperials. Guns? Illicit drugs? Black market medication? Substandard droid parts to be sold as good?
It doesn’t matter. But what ever it was couldn’t have been good.
And yes, he was something of a con man. Fast talker who thinks he’s smooth trying to convince the rubes to but what he’s selling. Bravado masquerading as confidence.
Han legitimately is a kick-ass pilot. That doesn’t make Chewy bad, but Han can fly. Astronavigation is done by the computer. Han input the destination and had to wait for the computer to check the course.
According to the lore, the Millennium Falcon has been heavily modified by its various owners too make it a bad ass smuggler’s ship. Thus the confusing and complicated efforts to make system repairs on the fly. That said, Han might be more bluster than ability. Hard to say.
It’s generally held that he was smuggling glitterstim spice from Kessel for Jabba, but not explicitly stated in the movies, AFAIK.
I checked the script - Jabba says it was spice when he confronts Han in the hangar, but that scene wasn’t in the original release. It was added in the 1997 remaster.
JABBA
Han, Han! If only you hadn't had to
dump that shipment of spice... you
understand I just can't make an
exception. Where would I be if every
pilot who smuggled for me dumped
their shipment at the first sign of
an Imperial starship? It's not good
business.
And not just the shooting, but how he walks out afterwards. Slow, calm, but with a bit of tension. And then he pays the bartender “because of the mess”.
Yes, everything about that scene shows Han is one cool dude who can handle problems.
Greedo appears just after he sends Chewy off, so he’s alone. Greedo had him at gun point and pushes him into the booth.
Han casually kicks back, throws a leg over a knee, and calmly sits there while Greedo threatens him.
He casually extends his leg arm up and fiddles with the wall, glancing up that direction to draw Greedo’s attention where he wants it.
When he’s ready and sure he can’t talk Greedo down, he shoots through the table with his right hand that he carefully placed on the pistol in his holster on the leg he propped up - that conveniently pointed said pistol right at Greedo’s chest.
Then he calmly stands up, makes sure no one is making a big deal to draw stormtrooper attention, and casually pays off the bartender to forget what he looks like.
Reminded me of something I noticed during our recent marathon. It seemed like every time a good guys’ ship was going to lift off, someone was messing around under it doing some welding or something that was shooting off sparks. Yeah, I guess it showed what a ragtag bunch they were. But when seen so consistently, over and over again, I found it amusing.
You can’t very well weld it after it’s taken off
Well, seems R2 and BB8 are able to do quite a bit of work on the fly. My thinking, tho, was that that maintenance could have been done at any time that the ships were just sitting there docked - BEFORE they were scrambling.
Well, that’s just SW using more tropes. The “Tramp freighter” that’s always on the verge of collapse, held together by a genius engineer who tinkers with it all the time. There’s always maintenance to be done, and sometimes the mechanic decides to rip apart the engines just before the captain decides they want to fly somewhere.
And then, there’s the mechanics for the fighter planes. It’s a classic WWII trope that they’re routinely pissed off at the hot-shot pilots who got their nice planes all shot up. Now they have to fix that shit in three minutes because the Nazis are about to bomb London.
There’s a trope called “hangar queen” for a plane that spends more time in maintenance than in the air.
I don’t remember specifics, but I definitely got the impression from the movies that Chewbacca was a much more competent mechanic than Han.
Well, there had to be something Chewie was good for beside being really physically intimidating. Although that’s also a handy tool in any smuggler’s toolbox.
In one of the Han Solo trilogy of books, there’s a scene where Chewbacca is trapped by a stampede of Space Cows, and has to improvise a hang glider out of some poles, some wire, and the corpse of a Space Pterodactyl he’d just shot.
It mostly worked.
So you’re saying that Chewie’s last name is MacGyver?