Special effects I'll give you. But pacing? Good grief, Star Wars ANH is glacially paced. For an adventure movie, it spends an awful lot of time walking around the desert looking lost.
Well I guess it depends on one's viewpoint. IMO most modern movies are essentially set on 1.25x speed. I feel like I never get a breath in before something else is happening. It's the pacing equivalent of a song mastered post "loudness wars" compared to ones that have actual dynamics.
And, as far as never surpassed, well, how do you measure that? Dollars brought in? Well, Avatar blew Star Wars out of the water years ago.
As I said elsewhere, I'm trying to consider things beyond just dollars, although that is, of course harder to quantify. In terms of raw dollars, it's hard to make any kind of comparisons over time. I know Hollywood loves to report on raw dollars, but anyone with any knowledge of how money works knows it's necessary
to adjust for inflation. By that score, you're right,
Avatar still wins, though of course it benefits from a much more global-sized audience, but in terms of cultural impact, not even close.
Number of fans? Well, I have to give Star Wars that one, it's certainly got its fans. Disney wouldn't be building a Star Wars theme park for nothing.
But, again, how much of Star Wars is the movies and how much of it is the marketing around the movies? No other movie franchise has as much money around the movie as the Star Wars franchise. Between toys, collectibles, games, theme parks, whatever, Star Wars is far more an industry unto itself than just a series of movies.
Modern Star Wars is, in my view, very different than old Star Wars of the late '70s. Modern Star Wars is a giant machine. It is very much in the belly of the beast.
At the time, the Star Wars trilogy were a cultural phenomenon in a way that few movies since have been but in many ways it came out of the underground. Partly this is because of the culture of the time, which was much more homogeneous. I was just a little kid then and only barely remember seeing it in the theater. I wasn't totally gaga over it for a bit... probably just too young, but it hit fairly quickly. There really wasn't anything like it before and, for better or worse, the kind of crossover toys, music, etc., just hadn't really existed before. In a lot of ways I liken it to Elvis or The Beatles in terms of influence. In terms of gross earnings, neither compare to artists today.
If you look on the linked IMDB page above, the original
Star Wars cost $11 million, so in terms of bang for the buck it's right up there with
Gone With the Wind. While
Titanic and
Avatar made more, they also cost a lot more.
Must … resist … urge … to deliver ... dissertation … contrasting … Gold Standard currency … with paper money … and … bore audience … describing inflation ! 
