Just an observation (as a science fiction author myself:http://tinyurl.com/nn4nskw ): almost all of the reasons given above (and indeed all of the quotes from the Star Wars Cannon) are taken--often verbatim--from the complaints of "gentlemen," for the last thousand years, bemoaning the fact that firearms allow "the unwashed" to defeat a "gentleman" in combat. It takes "patient, loving practice" (to quote Heinlein in Glory Road) to gain skill with a sword, and only the upper classes had the leisure time to gain such skill, so that any upperclass person, walking around with a sword on his hip, was the superior of any number of lowborn footpads armed with rocks and sticks. Firearms are indeed "inelegant," and other such disparaging terms... but they WORK. Colt "made all men equal"... and the upperclass doesn't like that very much. Technology has been doing this for thousands of years: making a skill which took much time to learn obsolete... and then receiving many complaints from those who had taken the time to learn the skill in the first place. Lucas simply tapped into a common attitude of complaint on the "swords versus pistols" debate.
