BTS According to Gary Kurtz...

What a coincidence! Kurtz stated that Lucas moved from one paradigm to the other exactly when he was fired!
Of course Kurtz will agree that in the movies he made, the aliens were used to compliment the story and in the ones he did not make they were used as a marketing device. That's the equivalent of "when I was making those films they were good, and now that I'm not making them they're bad".

But that's a really subjective opinion. How do you decide whether something (forget about aliens or droids, the leading characters were the best-sold toys!) feeds the story or is there purely for the merchandising? A story such as Star Wars is made specifically to provide a fantasy world for kids, a world where they can play around. There is a good moral story behind it (classic fairy-tale), but the way the story is told is DELIBERATELY cool and exotic and science fiction-y, and meant to spark a kid's imagination.
That's why they use blasters and lightsabers instead of regular guns and swords (and as a result, blasters and lightsabers become toys that can be sold), that's why characters become exotic aliens and droids, that's why they travel in space ships.That's why, for a lot of people who doesn't like SW, these are movies made to sell toys, from the first to the last movie (only fans believe that the first two movies were not made to sell toys but the rest of them were).

If Lucas only wanted to tell a fairy-tale story about a father and a son, he wouldn't have created a galaxy far far away. He would've set in the medieval times, as many other fairy-tales are set, and forget about the merchandising. But he did not that -not because he wanted to sell toys -but because he wanted to create a world of imagination for kids to play around (which leads to the need of selling toys both as a way to get money and as a way to provide elements for kids to play around).

 

While Gary Kurtz was gone when production of ROJ began, he nevertheless knew the original sequel intentions (from an ESB point of view so to say).

There was no second Death Star (I'm sure he would have mentioned it), Han Solo would have died and the film was supposed to have a "bittersweet" ending, with Leia being crowned queen of Alderaan (a symbolic ceremony, of course, since her planet had been destroyed in ANH).

 

There are many reasons to doubt that, including the fact that there were barely anything planned for the sequel.
To begin with, the idea of Han Solo dying is narratively incompatible with Han being frozen in Empire.

 

There's two Death Stars in the rough draft of ROTJ. They orbit Had Abbadon, the planet that we today know as Coruscant. Endor is a moon of Had Abbadon, but it's otherwise the same as the Endor in the finished film, Ewoks and all. The Emperor's Throne Room is deep inside his palace and is full of lava. Vader ultimately tackles the Emperor into the lava.

http://starwarz.com/starkiller/draft-variations-for-return-of-the-jedi/

 

Between September of 1980 and February of 1981, Lucas decided to have two Death Stars. But I also recall that at one point, there was consideration of it being the Executor that was being targeted and not a pair of Death Stars. Not sure how true that was, but definitely after TESB came out is when Lucas started to go that way. He went with the DS because he wanted to have an impact that said that the Empire was done for. And he didn't want to kill a bunch of people on Had Abbadon to make this point. Lucas and Kasdan went back and forth on this one as he thought it was too much like ANH, which is ironic given the Starkiller Base in TFA.

What's unclear is if there were plans to use the Death Star in November of 1978, during the story conference meetings between Lucas, Kasdan, Kurtz and Kershner. Much less a year earlier when Lucas was talking to Brackett. As to Han's death, if we go with what Brackett wrote, Lucas wanted Han to come back into the story. Ford was the one who advocated for it around 78-79. Han is captured in the second draft, but as far as I can tell, he's not frozen. Maybe he was. So, if the idea of killing Han materialized, it would have had to have been around this time. I think Lucas might have considered it for about ten minutes, but ultimately, he felt that Han should live. But was it about marketing his toy that this didn't happen? I think it probably played a small part, but wasn't the sole reason. I think Lucas really felt that he shouldn't have to keep killing off the heroes like that. His feelings about killing Obi-wan had already been discussed previously. And he didn't have a problem killing Qui-gon, Mace and other characters in the PT.