There are still plenty of things in the Prequels that smack of hedging bets. The way that the Anakin-Padme romance in Episode II basically turns into Titanic for a half hour for one, and arguably the sudden influx of wuxia into lightsaber combat.
Not that some of the new films haven't also attempted it with stuff from outside the franchise too. Just look at TRoS doing a chase in the desert with bikes because that makes it like Fury Road, right? Not to mention it and Solo cribbing extensively from Marvel's playbook.
You're absolutely right about the franchise pulling from other sources but I think cynically painting it as "hedging bets" isn't at all accurate because...
Well...
Star Wars has ripped from other movies since day damn one. The opening scroll that's become synonymous with Star Wars was taken from Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Its setting and lore reek of old sci-fi serials. The plot of the original movie is famously pulled from Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress. OT era lightsaber duels are based on Samurai movies.
Now, I'm not saying anything from a place of cynical "How dare they not be original!" cause nothing's original. I'm saying it cause to understand Star Wars (and Indiana Jones frankly) you have to understand one simple notion.
George Lucas is a fucking
nerd.
That whole generation of filmmakers are. They were some of the first people in Hollywood to have walked out of college with a little something called a Film Studies degree. They were derisively called something like "the Film School Kids" by established Hollywood people who thought of them as naive children who needed to learn about film making "the old fashioned way" which in no way involved being in a classroom researching filmcraft (though to be fair most of them
did that too; most famously under famous B-movie producer Roger Corman). I mean, Scorsese (still a friend of Spielberg and Lucas) is pretty much a professional film critic
as a hobby.
I bring this up to say that Lucas loves movies as a medium and that love bleeds through into his movies where, if you know your stuff, you can see the thousand little inspirations that make up his creative well. In that manner he's the precursor to Quentin Tarantino (sans foot fetish). And this bled down into the PT (Podracing is pretty much Space!Ben-Hur Chariot Racing and Jar-Jar's physical comedy is in some cases taken shot for shot from Buster Keaton). I honestly believe the reason why the lightsaber dueling in Eps I-III is the way it is was cause Lucas was watching Wuxia films (cause I totally see Lucas as a big enough
nerd to have watched a lot more than what the little bit that made it into mainstream American theaters) before pointing at the screen and saying, "That! I want to do that!" Lucas isn't a guy to chase trends as a way to make money. He chases trends cause he honestly thinks they're cool.
Now, that doesn't mean the people running the show
now are the same way but even then I can't complain on that front because, again,
Star Wars takes stuff from other movies all. the. time. and has since the moment it emerged from Lucas' mind palace. It's part of it's character at this point, like a mix between The Blob and the Thing that consumes and assimilates parts of the film landscape to feed and evolve off of. And I think that's fine because one of the roles of great art is to inspire more great art. Now, is it always going to be a hit? Probably not. But I honestly wouldn't change it for the world. The most I would do is try to make the people in charge of the product more competent with their execution and more daring with their ideas. We hit the sweet spot of those two things a lot less often than we need to for the health of the franchise.