Even that has a precedent in “peaceful but not pacifistic” philosophy, of using minimal force to prevent greater violence. If you take that to be the Jedi mindset, then it’s easy to see the light sabre as a voluntary restraint of destructive power. No range, and also no cutting edge when turned off. Actually pretty useful on board spacecraft where you don’t need range in a corridor, shooting into a crowd is a bad idea and puncturing the hull is a concern.
As amusing as “the Empire isn’t really evil” arguments can go, it’s thin gruel. The idea should be that the movies only show a tiny bit of the conflict, though pivotal moments. We get hints of the intimidation and rule by fear, but going into detail is boring and thus left out of the original trilogy. Rogue One does a pretty good job of showing how pervasive the atmosphere of intimidation was, but also in making the heroes look flawed through their usage of violence.
And we are having this discussion mainly because a guy did a bang-up job (ha!) of replicating a pivotal scene from the movie.
