re: How far ahead of it's time was Star Wars?

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That's the big problem I have with modern CGI. It's too frenetic and impossible-looking.

I wish more people would still make movies like the original Star Wars, with real locations, modelwork, makeup and real stunts.

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Exactly. Now that most, if not all fx are done in a computer, you can do just about anything, but then again everything starts to look the same. When working on orginal trilogy things the fx artists had to get creative.

With the original trilogy, the backdrops were all painted works, and the ships/action scenes were all done with models, which gave a more realistic feel to it - parts that were on the outsides of ships really were three dimensional and not just shaded/foreshortened to look that way Lucas was well ahead of his time with ILM and (later) Skywalker Sound, not just with Star Wars but with other movies they were a part of.

Going back to the creative part, I remember seeing a documentary piece on the model making, and one of the things they had to do was either for flying the trench on DeathStar 1 or into the interior on DeathStar 2, the space wasn't large enough to fit the camera into in order to track the ships, so they had to make the set "unzip" like a zipper. The models went down the track with the camera behind them pulled in on a tight shot. After the models passed, the entire set slit left and right so the camera housing could follow.

Also, the lengths they went to in order to get/create sounds. I think the sound of the blasters came from banging something against the braided metal guidewires of tv/radio broadcast antennas. The sound of the giant boulder at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark came from putting a car in neutral, shutting off the engine and letting it roll down a gravel road with a mic pointed at the contact patch of one of the wheels.