"Let me explain. . . Wait, there is no time. Let me sum up." -- Inigo Montoya
WOTC had 3 version of Star Wars RPG. The first two, OCR and RCR, were reskins of D&D 3.0 and 3.5 mechanics and used material from West End Games as a source.
The Saga Edition mechanics were based on an early version of 4th edition D&D. Before the SE Core Rules was published, the authors showed how the 3.5 classes might look under SE, including fringer, force adept, tech specialist, and the two Jedi classes.
Rodney Thompson and some of the other authors felt they needed to simplify the game to get it down to a more "movie" feel and less of a "crunchy D&D reskin feel" (paraphrasing there, but that was the gist). For the final version, they merged the two jedi classes together, gave fringer abilities to the scout as talent trees, moved Force Adept into a prestige class, and dropped tech specialist because they felt not enough people would be into crafting and fixing things. Not many missed the fringer and consensus was that merging the Jedi classes was a good idea. . . but some fans (and even authors) felt they went too far with tech specialist and force adept.
We had the WEG templates that were the source, we had OCR and RCR d20 Star Wars rules, we had the promotional Saga beta versions posted, and we saw how they had merged/cut fringer and the Jedi classes, so WizO Tau and I, pretty much independently, felt like we could do a good job of recreating Saga versions of those two classes. We were forum moderators, so up they went on the WOTC board and they turned out to be popular, thanks to the SE authors (especially Gary Sarli) providing input on cut talent trees. Parts of the classes later appeared in the form of Web Enhancements, which in turn made it into future books as feats and talent trees for other classes.
WOTC lost the license and the boards went down. WizO-Tau and I revised them and they lived on saga-edition.net for a while before that went down too. When we saw this wiki was started, I talked about it with Wiz-O and we decided to dust off the .txt files, update them a little, and post them here.
So yes, they DID exist in previous published versions of the WOTC d20 Star Wars, yes they were based on WEG templates, yes they were going to be in Saga before it was decided to trim classes down to only 5, and yes they were re-constructed using talent trees from other classes that were cut from Core but later featured as web enhancements and then as content in other books in the system.
I hope that clears up any confusion.