It's not a matter of "appreciating the massacre to the original expanded universe stories" as you say, it's appreciating the fact that The Force Awakens is a good movie. The EU stories weren't even written by George Lucas. I'm a fan of the EU, but those stories were written by mostly generic sci-fi authors using their own imagination. They had certain rules to follow like not being able to kill off main characters, but that's about as much influence as George had. The only reason he allowed books to be written taking place after Return of the Jedi is because he didn't plan on ever making the sequel trilogy and only decided around 2010 that sequels needed to be made.
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