Are we really pretending George was thinking about this while making Jedi?
No. I'm a proponent of the death of the author school of literary analysis. I don't care what George Lucas was thinking. Indeed, he's shown himself to not be the best at figuring this sort of stuff out.
What I'm doing here is having fun. I'm taking a work of fiction and seeing how far I can run with it. You, on the other hand, are feeling embarrassed about having fun and avoiding it. There's a famous quote by CS Lewis that I think is apt here.