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Problem I have heard is that so many of the new novels are trash, especially aftermath. Also tried watching Rebels and just couldn't get into it. Same with Clone Wars sadly. And I am not going to go out and buy comics.
So far I've read all of the new novels, plus am about to finish the young adult novels, then move on to the short stories. I'm up on the comics except for the Chewbacca series and the Vader Down crossover, I think.
The novels are pretty good. It's not literature... you're not going to get Lord of the Rings or To Kill a Mockingbird, and fortunately they don't try to be those things. Aftermath is the weakest book, probably, mostly because of the author's style, which is just lazy and horrid. I get that ever since House of Leaves some authors think they can market terrible communication skills as being artistic, but it makes the book incredibly hard to read. I've heard it's better as an audio book. Aftermath is also the worst example of forcing an OT character into the story.
As far as just Star Wars fandom goes, the young adult novels might be the best (other than Tarkin, which I've decided is far and away the best of the novels). They're short and to the point, and just tell a direct, self-contained story. You can burn through any of the Journey to The Force Awakens novels in a few hours of dedicated reading and glean some interesting background on other events and characters in the universe. Lost Stars is longer, and in many ways is like one of the later Harry Potter books in that much of it happens at the Imperial Academy with a cast of supporting characters (the computer geek, the roommate whose dad is a big shot), but with sexual content aimed at teenagers; nothing explicit, of course.
The comics are good, and much of the focus has been on little side-stories that are limited runs, which is a smart approach. The continuous run comics are fun filler for what happened immediately post-Yavin.
The best criticism of the books is that they do, at times, try too hard to pin the new characters to old characters. They're WAY better about this than the old EU books, however. The old EU focused a LOT of the continuing adventures of the Big Three, and it got really tired, really fast. Each book had to push the envelope of their abilities and relationships and it went on pretty well unchecked until it was totally out of hand. The new materials have focused more on telling stories about new heroes and villains that only tangentially intersect characters from the OT or other media. A Zabrak bounty hunter in Aftermath is the niece of another character that Clone Wars fans will remember. Another Aftermath character was a Y-Wing pilot at Endor. Poe Damereon's mother flew a mission for Luke after RotJ. Etc. Little coincidences that mean something to die-hard fans familiar with the extended canon, but not something that detracts if you're not in the loop.
The top criticism of the comics, as a Star Wars fan, is that stories arc very quickly and there's not a ton of development. That's just a casualty of the medium, however. They jumped to Luke briefly encountering Vader right off the bat, for example. If it were a novel or TV series it would be more nuanced, but in comics, something must happen in every panel and the story has to move quickly. Just the way it is.
Overall, they've gone a good job imo, and the volume is not at all out of control. The fact that all of the materials have to go through the Story Group serves as a much needed bottleneck.
