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Mostly unrelated to the topics being discussed, but does anyone else find the idea of a Galactic Senate completely unrealistic? Using Earth as an example, the extreme diversity of a planet makes it seem pretty unrealistic. Is Naboo the most diverse planet in Star Wars?
I hear you. But I took the term `Senate' loosely. The planets are probably almost entirely self-governing, and only very, very major infrastructure projects would need the Senator to speak for them. The other thing to understand is there is a suspension of disbelief that the SW Universe clearly asks for regarding planets:
"Extreme diversity of a planet" is exactly what they almost never show. They use planets for visual purposes as a kind of short-hand for nations, or more precisely, city-states. Since even nations have great variety, again usually never implied.
If you take the "Coruscant" syndrome as a template, you will see it tends to be forest world, ice world, Cape Canaveral World (that is what Scarif looked like), Nyiragongo Volcano world (Mustafar.)
This works just fine if you let it just be a story. The handling of planets in this aspect has always been kind of ludicrous for the reasons you mentioned.
Think of the Senate as the same way --- shorthand for the `city state' representatives.
[But I say ludicrous in a teasing way --- I actually very much enjoy the shorthand formula, how it operates. But SW can frustrate anyone that has interest in geography and geological realities of variation, or biospheres, lol. Sometimes you see it, but it never overtakes much the dominant pattern above.]