Or the Force could be something that was not necessarily hereditary which it was never fully confirmed to be in the original movies.
Oh I don't think it is necessarily hereditary. I thought force-sensitive individuals could come from any station of life in the universe at random.
I just meant that the easiest way to build upon the narrative foundation laid by the films would be for Luke and Leia to be related, if the idea was that Luke would be the start of a resurgent Jedi order. If they are related, it would then be easier to track the resurgence of Force users (and to build a narrative that they ARE resurgent), because you could start with any offspring of Luke and Leia, as they would naturally have the gift.
You could focus on those related individuals while you search the universe for others with Force capability that are NOT related to the Skywalkers.
Also, did any of that stuff you say actually happen or was it implied at all in the movies? Or was it only in the expanded universe? I'm not talking about what the expanded universe people did with it. I'm talking about tangible effects on the movie. The movie did nothing with the information that Luke and Leia were related except to: (1) Kill the love triangle; (2) Give Luke an excuse to go ham on Vader in the end. Both of those could have been done much cleaner and less weirdly IMO. To number 1: Luke is a Monk now. To number 2: His friends are dying and/or being captured at the time. It's easy to write an emotional switch in for Luke there.
I always thought the title "Return of the Jedi" was a reference to both the fact that Luke had become a Jedi AND that his victory over the Sith would open a the path for more Jedi to be trained/discovered in the future. Like the Order was set for a Return based on the action of the film, whether it was actually in the movie or not.
I'm not going to bat for the decision, btw, just saying that I understood why Lucas made them related. It adds an extra layer to Vader's history, and makes any future narratives (like the EU stories, which I haven't actually read) a bit easier with an easy thread to follow based on an expanding family tree of Force Users.
They could have accomplished the same things without making them related, but there was also the moment where Leia uses her connection to the Force at the end of Empire to have Lando turn around to go and find Luke hanging from the Cloud City station. They could have explained it off as they were flying by and just saw him, but the way it was written into the plot provides another reason to make them related.
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