Bluntly, comparing Star Wars to Exalted in this way is wrong. They are
sharply different kinds of stories. Star Wars is very much a drama-first kind of story; one of its central elements is the Force, a nebulous thing controlled by feelings, relationships, and destiny. Darth Vader didn't pull out some scanner to detect Obi Wan on the Death Star, he supernaturally sensed the presence of a powerful rival and former friend.
By contrast, Exalted is the kind of setting which sweats the details. The game prides itself on this, trumpets it as one of the major selling points that sets it apart from, say, D&D.
It's why one of the major contributions that Grabowski brought to the creation of the setting was his background knowledge not as an author or a game designer, but an
economist. You can see this in how the game has always taken the time to talk about the different financial systems in use throughout the world.
It's why most of the diseases listed in the corebooks are
things like cholera and dysentry instead of magical nonsense illnesses that turn your blood into snakes.
It's why when Stephen Lea Sheppard, a long-time and current writer for Exalted, talked about
the Four Layers of Exalted, the very first thing he brought up was history, anthropology, politics, and economics. Books like
"Seeing Like A State, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 1491, and a lot of National Geographic and history and military theory textbooks".
Textbooks, not novels.
It's why if you dig into the history of quotes by the writers and developers, one of the things that keeps turning up is an appreciation for the consistency and real-world mapping of the setting. How, despite the fact that Creation is a flat world nailed to a sea of pure chaos by elemental poles where the sun is a giant burning dirigible sailed across the sky by a god, it
feels like a believable, internally consistent world where people not much different to us live, and worry about the kinds of things we would worry about in their shoes.
And it's why, yes, people argue that crossbows not being widespread throughout the 2e setting is dumb, on the basis that it doesn't map to the real world and there is no justification given or implied by the text. Because Exalted generally tries very hard
and prides itself on trying very hard to do these things.
You've tried to justify this (to us or yourself, I care not which) on the basis that Creation is not our world so anything goes, when one of the greatest and most laudable things about Exalted's writing is that from the beginning it has tried to reject that very principle.
Not really. Roman military doctrine prized a professional military primarily composed of well-trained, well-equipped heavy infantry. Rome used archers and cavalry and skirmishers, but the fundamental building block of their armies was the Legionnaire. They didn't use crossbows en masse because they didn't have the military need to quickly train and equip large armies of militia.
Despite all that, there is still evidence of Rome using crossbows in a limited fashion.
