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There are narrative reasons for this- namely imperial doctrine pushes for really big ships over more ships and the rebel fleet has to keep up, and it tends to centralize authority in one spot so a single fleet getting wiped out fractures imperial power, despite the existence of thousands more.
Lore tends points to a single star destroyer as basically a 1-1 match for a mid level industrialized world, which almost axiomatically points to the tax revenues from multiple planets being needed to find a single one. That also points to a security doctrine which needs to hold back a huge majority of the fleet to respond to rebellions and protests because it’s definitionally outnumbered badly. All this accords with stated imperial doctrine- eg the Tarkin doctrine. When push comes to shove the empire is undergunned(perhaps due to its unpopularity) and attempting to compensate with intimidation factor. Even small losses(what Endor objectively was) can unravel that fast and even small victories add up.
To steelman the imperial plan at Endor, the goal was to lure the rebel capital ship fleet into a trap and eliminate it, so that the privateering and insurgency would be crushable by smaller ships making up the bulk of the fleet(this fits with the old EU’s characterization), but the elimination of the top two figures along with multiple flag officers led to local governors and satraps declaring independence with the help of ambitious imperial military officers, which formed an imperial death spiral. It wasn’t battlefield losses that broke imperial military might- it was state failure.
I like the EU as much as anyone. I like how in the Thrawn books they try and rationalize the setting, make things seem more logical and explain Endor as the fleet being borg-slaved to the Emperor so it unravelled after he died... I like this ridiculously big EU political compass: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheDeepCore/comments/ll19bs/12x12_political_compass_for_star_wars/
But if 4km long, thin, pointy Star Destroyers are rare and expensive capital ships, how are the Imperials able to build a 160 km wide, spherical Death Star, then make good progress on an even bigger one 4 years after the first is lost? The black budget for superweapons surely can't be more than 5% of the economy, or even half the military budget. We only know of a few highly industrialized planets in the Empire, Kuat and Corellia for instance. There doesn't seem to be much broad-based wealth, nor does the administration seem very efficient if there are large pools of Hutts, smugglers and bounty hunters running around doing their own thing.
They should not be capable of building gigantic moonsized planetbusters if they can't field thousands and thousands of star destroyers.
Lucasfilm and Disney do not understand the logic of wealth and military procurement, there's no basic sense of understanding scale. Putting to one side all the expert analysis of Star Wars scale they do on spacebattles (for instance here: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/star-wars-mass-of-a-star-destroyer.464536/) it just doesn't make any sense. The Kaminoans supplied 300,000 clones for the Republic with a million more well on the way! That's about enough to secure Ukraine, not the galaxy. The First Order somehow manage to produce an even bigger planetary superweapon that eats stars. Palpatine manages to throw together a gigantic fleet of Star Destroyers from a hidden planet at the edge of the galaxy.
The empire did have tens of thousands of imperial star destroyers, though, and tens of thousands more lesser capital ships. We see the pride of the fleet, but we don’t the the kinds of massive formations the empire is theoretically capable of, and there’s tons of reasons for this. How often do all twelve US carriers operate together?
What we see on screen is the equivalent of a single carrier strike group. There are hundreds more in the fleet and the empire disintegrates rather than being defeated in a war of attrition. The disintegration is likely a result of coup-proofing; both the big boss and his top guy are gone, and no one else has the loyalty of the entire fleet, so individual flag officers and moffs have every incentive to play hardball with both the central government and each other, and eventually to secede into warlordism.
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Your political compass link takes me to a picture of a nice hat.
That is quite strange. It should've been https://old.reddit.com/r/TheDeepCore/comments/ll19bs/12x12_political_compass_for_star_wars/
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