Justin Cormack wrote:
What does a book cover add to an article on War and Peace?
If nothing else, it makes it clear that the article is about the book, not the movie, or the board game, or the ...
Now, what does the Abbey Road album cover add to its article? Quite a bit it turns out - the article even has a section entitled "The famous photograph".
Most uses are just decoration, and they are stopping free images being used to replace them. You can be quite lateral with illustration.
Where are you expecting to get free images with which to illustrate Star Wars? They don't exist. Photos of Yoda dolls are not only pathetic, but they are not enencumbered copyright-wise either - the movie maker retains rights to the characters, and gives out licenses to reproduce them in other media. WP does not have such a license.
Anyway, even if you eliminate "most uses" because they are just decoration, you haven't got rid of all of them. And if the use of copyrighted material compromises WP's goal of being a free encyclopedia, that principle applies to copyrighted textual quotes as well. So unless you're prepared to delete fair-use quotes, you still haven't got a "free encyclopedia". In fact, the quotes are a more serious problem for the freeness goal, because while the images are tagged and filterable, the quotes are not easily removable.
Stan