I honestly think Star Trek really hurt Sci Fi on Tv as a whole. The writing for that show has never been all that great...even in the original series.
All the the Original Trek was groundbreaking for it's day, the writing was sub-par at best. You can watch the very first episoed and then the very last episode of the series and the characters are EXACTLY THE SAME! There was zero character growth throughout the entire series....poor writing in my opinion.
When TNG came along, it was just more of the same. Every episode had the senior crew sitting around that damn conference room discussing their feelings on the subject at hand while they were in the middle of some crisis. Couple that with the pseudo-science of just "remodulating" some divice with a name with little to no vowels in it and magically they were saved! Again, we saw the same formula of no continuity through episodes to the point where you had plotlines completely contradicting previous episodes and people STILL watched the show!
When DS9 came on, they actually tried to do something different, but again fell into the same routine. At first, there was a lot of conflict between members of the crew, but after the first season, they were all the harmonious bunch of yes men just like every other trek crew. What really angers me about this is at the same time, one of the best Sci Fi shows ever to hit television, Babylon 5, was on and while they had to struggle for each season to be aired, DS9 was picked up with no problems and they even blatantly stole the plot from B5 come the third season.
Voyager was pure crap from episode 1 to the series finale. It was so bad that even Trekkies started complaining for the first time in 30 years instead of blindly watching and acting like lemmings. So what do they do..."Here's the Borg....now shut up and keep watching".
They also made shows like Earth Final Conflict and Andromeda....these shows were absolutely horrible, but they slapped Gene Roddenberry's name on them so that they could attract the faithful Trekkies.
As far as the success of a Star Wars tv project? Who knows? We all know we're going to watch it, but if the writing isn't good, a lot of us would probably stop watching pretty quick.