Maybe wishful thinking. I’m sure the remnants of the Empire feel about Ewoks what Klingons felt about tribbles.
Hmm. That rings a bell with me, too, but I think it was in one of the earlier books; X-Wing: Wedge’s Gamble, to be specific. I can’t seem to find my copy of it though, so if anyone else has got the book have a look.
It doesn’t seem out of character. If you look at the Jedi in the prequels, they don’t show any real concern for human rights or justice. They back the Republic in the Clone Wars not because the Republic is morally superior to the Independent Systems (and, in fact, we don’t know that it is…we don’t know exactly what the independents do believe). Even their opposition to Palpatine isn’t rooted in their fear that he’ll be oppressive or dictatorial (which is Amadala’s concern), but that he’s a Sith They object to his religion, not to his policies.
The only thing Palpatine did, though, regarding the Naboo crisis, though, was to encourage the normally cautions Trade Federation to take aggressive action, first by blockading Naboo and then by invading it. The Senate’s bureaucratic inability to deal with the crisis is its fault, not Palpatine’s.
To be fair, it isn’t a simple dislike of his religion. Both “Jedi” and “Sith” are essentially the same religion; there’s just different takes on it. Palpatine’s taken the evil bastard view, also known as the Sith view. It’s not like he might actually be a good guy; he isn’t. At all.
Not so. Palpatine, as the representative for Naboo, deliberatly sabotaged the Senate’s ability to deal with the crisis by carefully crafting his arguments as to why there should be an intervention. After all, he’s the person in charge of making Naboo’s case (until Padme shows up), so it’s pretty easy for him to make sure the Senate don’t take it as seriously as they should.
See, I had initially assumed that it was in geosync orbit, but if you look at this screengrab then it appears to be much, much lower than geo. (However, I concede that that could’ve just been a convenience on behalf of the holograph artists; realistically depicting the distances would make the artwork really boring to look at.) If I remember correctly, the holographic planet was rotating with the DS2 north of the equator, which would’ve been impossible in geosync orbit, but this again may have been an convenience for the poor overworked rebel holo artist. 
At any rate, I didn’t feel it was assuming too much that the DS2 was in a much lower orbit, and artificially held on its otherwise unstable trajectory with the assistance of massive repulsors or whatnot.
That bothered me a bit as well. I reached the conclusion that it was either: a navigation error as you said; or part of a larger strategy that calls for leaving hyperspace into a more defensible position followed by moving closer to the target.
Slight aside: we see this “defensible position” strategy criticized by Darth Vader in the Empire’s assault on Hoth, but in that situation the Imperial fleet was comprised mostly of Star Destroyers, which are far more maneuverable than the Death Star.
I got the impression that the starfighters in Star Wars are just Real Friggin’ Fast.
Yep, my bad. Too vague on my part. I meant something like a hyperbolic trajectory (a non-elliptical orbit), not necessarily something that would purposefully resemble a stable elliptical orbit. As far as burning up delta-v, ships seem to carry with them considerable velocity as they leave hyperspace. It’s conceivable though unlikely that leaving hyperspace could put you into a stable orbit.
But on the other hand, I would imagine that for safety’s sake, you would generally calculate your jump to put you into a stable orbit, so that in case the engines died upon arrival, you could guarantee not smacking into a star or a supernova or something else that would end your trip real quick.
At any rate, I tentatively disagree that the Imperials would aim the DS straight toward the target. It seems safer for the DS if they assumed a strafing formation rather than a full-on charge.
Could you expand on that? It seems obvious that the DS had Yavin plus a lot of space between it and the rebel base, but the DS2 was agonizingly close to the Endor moon. That is, if we’re comparing the range from the Death Stars to the respective inhabited moons, and not to the primary planets.
And they always seem to miss the annoyingly over-cute animals too, which kinda shoots my “Ewoks fried” theory full of holes.
Well, I’m assuming there is some concern about the imperial budget.
The chances that they’d have the right velocity (a vector, remember) to put them into a stable orbit seems one in a million. But, anytime you’re affected by the gravity of Yavin, you’re in a hyperbolic orbit by definition. It’s possible that they’d use Yavin for a gravity assist to pull them around to where they want to be, but at that level of technology I’d assume they just power through it.
For the most part, it seems ships come out of hyperspace a reasonable distance from their destination, and not heading right for it, as you say. I don’t know how accurately they can pick an exit point, but trying to come out in orbit seems like asking for trouble, especially when you can maneuver to where you want to go easily.
Okay, not right to it, but in the general direction of it. (I assume they’d try to miss the debris that results from the explosion - though even the Falcon’s shields had no trouble with the debris from Alderan.) But any type of orbit that lines you up with the target will take you away from it 10 minutes later.
Say the moon is 500K miles above the surface of Yavin. The Death Star can come out of hyperspace roughly 500K above the surface also, and just hidden by the planet. Actually, we don’t see the DS very close to Yavin, and I’m having trouble getting the physics of the situation to makes sense. Say they’re close to Yavin - when they come out they’re 500K miles away. If they’re on the other side of Yavin, they’re nearly a million miles away. In both cases that is pretty far to keep the beam tight. They may not want to get too close to the moon, but they could certainly fire from further than anything the rebels have would reach.
Of course, maybe the situation was set up by someone physics challenged to build drama.
Nah, that couldn’t be. 
Well, they’re essentially the same religion in the sense that Catholicism and Protestantism are both Christianity…they’re both force-worship. But they have different systems of ethics, and different ideas of what the force is and how the force should be used. The Sith are certainly “evil” according to the Jedi point of view, but the fact that Palpatine is a Sith is enough for the Jedi to consider him evil.
And I’m not convinced that the Jedi are all that “good”. They take toddlers from their parents, raise them in monestaries, and through childhood and beyond, tell them, “You can’t have emotional attachments to another person. It’s wrong for you to express your feelings. It’s wrong for you to get angry or passionate about anything, it’s wrong for you to want anything. It’s wrong for you to think about yourself before others.” And they’re quietist and conservative. There’s no room for dissent. They hound Dooku out of the order for his views on the “balanced force” and for his ideas that the Jedi have a responsibility to help reform injustice, and deny Qui-Gon a seat on the Jedi Council for his views on the “living force”. They blindly support the Republic, and spend most of their time in the prequels worried about Jedi prophecy. Even Yoda chides the Jedi for their arrogance in assuming that, because Kamino doesn’t appear on Jedi star charts, it doesn’t exist. The Jedi, with the exception of a few, like Yoda, are unable to conceive that the Jedi maps could be wrong or altered.
But you can’t blame it entirely on Palpatine. Chancellor Valorum sent Qui-Gon and Obi-wan to negotiate with the Trade Federation in the first place because he knew that the Senate bureaucracy would make action impossible. And, even after Padme shows up, the Senate is unwilling to take action to settle the crisis. They instead spent all their time arguing whether the Trade Federation was to blame or not. As the Star Wars official site says about the Senate in that era:
Yes, but the ethical view of a Sith is enough to characterise them as evil. Sith see the Force as a tool to use in gaining power for themselves, that the force is fueled by strong negative emotions. Plus Palpatine had already sent an assassin, Maul, to kill some Jedi/thwart the Naboo.
Ah, now, the corruption of the Jedi? That I can get behind. They’d become far too focused on becoming essentially a police force, and not the meditative council they’d once been, blinding them to the possibilities of *not * jumping forward with a lightsaber in hand, not taking an aggressive route. And this in turn led them to become very Republic-centred; they were all about “saving the Republic” “keeping power in the Senate” when they should have been thinking about saving the people. The Jedi conflated “I must do good” with “I must uphold the Republic’s ideas of good”, and that would have led to their downfall regardless of Palpatine. Arrogant is the perfect word to describe them. They saw themselves as being better than everyone else and above the law. I’d add aloof and poorly taught.
That’s true, and you do have a quote to back it up. I’d agree that there were inevitable problems with the Senate system, just as there is in any democracy, and the inclusion of a few thousand representatives doesn’t tend to make for a unanimous house.
I’d go for a comprimise position, then. The Old Republic would likely have fallen or splintered at some point, but Palpatine took advantage of this and sped it up, as well as using the failures of the regime as an excuse to get what he wanted. He didn’t create the problem, but he did manipulate it to his own advantage.
It’s worth noting in addition to your quote that after Palpatine declared himself Emperor many of the Senators and other people in good positions stayed on as local governors. Captain Panaka from Phantom Menace for example, became a powerful player under the Imperial system.