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I appreciate you sharing your thoughts on what you’ve played through so far in 7.4, I’m glad you found a fair amount of things to enjoy! Since I was tagged, I’d like to take this opportunity to pull back the curtain slightly and look at why certain narrative threads do and do not end up in the final product.
First, the most important thing to remember is that SWTOR is a BIG GAME. I know y’all know this already but I’m reiterating it anyway because it is a BIG. GAME. There are so many narrative threads–different character arcs, story permutations, big decisions–that you will experience from the second you arrive on the starter planet for your Origin Story.
However, when you compare the vast amount of potential narrative foundations to the resources we have to build on them, we have to be very mindful. Even for the things that seem like a no-brainer, like the examples you pointed out, we have to be very cognizant of where we spend our finite time and effort.
The more resources a piece of content uses, the wider breadth of the audience it has to be relevant to. A letter from a specific companion (even one that makes narrative sense to include) will only reach a portion of the audience, but it requires writing, feedback collecting, editing, revising, implementing, scripting, documentation, localization, and testing. On the other hand, a class-specific line in a KOTOR-style scene also reaches only a portion of the audience, but it has a considerably smaller impact on time and resources.
A similar example that you mentioned–choosing recognizable characters from the Agent, Inquisitor, and Warrior Origin Stories to appear on Port Nowhere. If an option exists to kill a character–as is the case for many of the notable characters from these Origin Stories–including them in the story means writing double the lines, recording double the dialogue, which snowballs into additional cinematic, design, scripting, and testing tasks.
Now, all that isn’t to say that killable characters will never be included (we’ve included several of them at the forefront of recent updates!), but it does partially inform our decisions. If we include a character with the potential to be so narrowly recognized, their inclusion in the narrative must be especially meaningful, even to players who do not recognize that character. Also, prioritizing content that has the widest impact across all players means our range of content can be polished to our necessary quality standards.
All that was a lot of words to say that when we’re considering the narrative threads to include in content, we view all the options through this multi-faceted lens of cost vs. impact. We choose what to include based on what fits our narrative goals, has a meaningful and far-reaching impact, and won’t be a detriment to scope, cost, and quality in the ways I’ve described. As humans with a finite amount of resources, that sometimes means we can’t include everything we’d like to. But these stories aren’t forgotten, and they still mean as much to us as they do to y’all!