masshysteria
Explorer
I have played d20 Star Wars (not SAGA, though). I was not impressed, for a couple of reasons.
I'm going to pick apart your reasons, not because they are wrong. But they were all addressed in the Saga edition. If you are playing the original or revised d20 versions, then I agree 100%.
And just so my biases are upfront. Saga has become my go-to game for Star Wars and is probably my favorite flavor of 3.5-era d20 rules.
First, the rules didn't streamline as well as d6. Flying a ship felt different than flying a speeder bike. And combat was something entirely different than a negotiation. While this might be a minor quibble, I've always preferred to mix up my scenes in Sci-Fi - so that while one guy is flying the ship, another is using the guns while a third is trying to plan a route using a computer.
Character, vehicle, and starship combat all use the same rules in Saga. There is some scaling at the starship scale, but all the rules are analogs of what is one at the character scale.
On a starship/vehicle, players can take different roles. So you can have a gunner, pilot, and senors operator working flawlessly.
Second, the action economy of d20 doesn't work to emulate that cinematic flavour. In d6, I can fly a speeder bike at top speed while also shooting a pistol at someone - this is more or less impossible in RAW d20.
Saga pretty much removed full round actions and iterative attacks. So, combat moves swiftly and characters are always moving around the action (since a move action is almost always available).
As far as operating a speeder bike and shooting on this same round. I'm pretty sure it is do-able.
Third, the characters in d20 are way too limited, in comparison to the source material. When you have X number of classes to choose from, and you have a character type in mind, sometimes it becomes a matter of sacrifices to your character concept because of the class you play.
The base classes in Saga are much more versatile and there are no multi-class penalties. Saga also introduced the + half heroic level to skills, so a medium level character is fairly competent at most tasks and a high level character can do a variety of things.
Throw in talents every even level and feats every odd level and you can make a very focused character or a jack-of-all trades.
I guess my point is, when comparing Star Wars games, Saga Edition is a very different beast than the other two d20 versions. It won me over enough that I didn't feel bitter about buying the prior two d20 lines.