I used the 2nd Edition, Revised & Expanded Rules. You never had 30 dice to throw.
Each player usually kept about 6 dice in front of him, but he'd typicall throw 2-4 D6 at any one time. That's not unmanageable at all.
It might be that I, as a GM, was pretty stingy with Character Points. I'd lookk at people like Vader and Luke. Even those guys didn't have too many CPs or Force Points.
It sounds like maybe your GMs were letting you improve your character at too fast a pace.
As for throwing 30 dice, that never happened once in my entire 3 year campaign. If a player uses a Force Point, he can double his dice for the round. Still, even with that happening (which is rare, because Force Points are rare), you're only looking at 14 or 16 dice. Yeah, that's a bit unmanageable, but it only happened once in a blue moon--and, I found the players get off to throwing that big, honkin', hand full of dice every once in a while. Makes 'em feel like a bad-ass.
Also, Character Points can be used to either keep your character alive or to improve the character. My players didn't do a lot of character improving because they were always saving their meager CPs to keep their avatars alive.
It's different play styles, I guess. I ran a fairly dangerous campaign.
We had a lot of characters die.
The system can be abused, as can CT or d20 or GURPS or any other game. If you're routinely throwing 10-15 dice, that means your character is better than Vader and Luke....you might want to adjust because of that.
