After a brief period of fascination, I came to dislike that saber for both canon and personal reasons.
 
First, the angle of those beam crosstrees make them hazardous to the user, and add no advantage which actual sharpened crosstrees of phrik alloy or cortosis wouldn’t provide.  
Second, that saber is of poor quality. Texts say the crosstrees were actually necessary because Darth Paintballer had limited skill and poor materials. They act as a safety valve, because attempting to channel the power cell’s energy through one beam might overload the device. That raw fiery blade comes from using a flawed Kyber crystal. And if you look at closeups or even a toy of the hilt you see it’s needlessly bulky, has wires passing outside the casing, and uses some graceless exposed fasteners.
 
I won’t deny the visual impact an unstable crystal provides, though. By playing The Force Unleashed, I discovered that I prefer the look of an unstable amber blade the most.

@Whiteeyes  
It isn’t all that edgy, and taking the rarest component for your first forged weapon from a slain enemy you is a lot like many rites of passage for real-world and fictional cultures. It’s a test of your abilities and worthiness to progress to a full-fledged status.
 
And should things with the quasi-mystical properties of Kyber crystals really be available through manufacturing? If they were, The Old Republic would have doled lightsabers out to elite military units by the hundreds, if not thousands.

@Eeveeinheat  

 
No more stupid than the thought of Sith ignoring the crystals in defeated enemies’ sabers for millennia.

@Eeveeinheat  
Agreed. Stop trying to be more edgy it is just dumb.

@Dr. Thaddeus Bong  
That’s… acrually really stupid.

@Whiteeyes
 
New canon also states that the Sith reds are artificial. Without the influence of a Dark Side wielder, though, the beams gradually fade to white. Ahsoka Tano’s ‘Rebels’ sabers used a salvaged set of those.
 
Edit on 4/27/21:  
I was mistaken. A Sith’s saber crystal is claimed from a Jedi they’ve slain, and then subjected to emotional torment until it “Bleeds”. The process makes the crystal glow red once completed.  
Vader’s crystal tried to blunt his onslaught by giving visions of thing that would give him peace: avoiding the bad decisions which doomed him, and having his hopeless existence ended by the ones he’d hurt.
 
I’m still pretty sure that the process can be reversed, and that Ahsoka made sabers from rehabilitated crystals after defeating an Inquisitor they belonged to.

@Makarosc  
Acording to very new cannon. Old cannon is that red was artificial since tge jedi controlled the natural crystal deposits and the sith needed focusing crystals somehow.

The image is good but They don’t look like sith not yellow eyes pail complection I mean lightsabers that are red are the because the sith bleed the Crystal on mustafar

“I can also pick up radio stations with this thing.”

@AlsoSprachOdin  

 
Both would in my mind work. As StarWars never attempted to be anything but an homage to the 40s ~ 50s Saturday Bijue serials. I don’t we’d look at Flash Gordon of that epoch or, the really cheesey 80 Queen version and, cite what a masterpiece of cinematography it was.

@Ichijoe  
Hard sci-fi is best sci-fi.

@Whiteeyes  
I read it as “a cheesy space opera” as “a space opera, which, as we all know, is cheesy”. On second thought, it could in fairness be meant as “a cheesy kind of space opera”.

If you want to see SciFi done right, then 2001: A Space Odyssey, or of a more modern epoch, Gravity. NO SOUNDS IN SPACE

That of course was the fallacy of my argument. >Implying that StarTrek could be taken seriously. When its just as riddeled with as many holes as StarWars. IIRC they’re both quit guilty of the biggest crime in cinema SciFi… Sound carrying in a vacuum. What I ment to say was that Trek has since tried as much as possible outside of it own tropes i.e. Warp Drive, the Teleporter, to make the attempt at being as relatively accurate as possible. StarWars OTOH misused cool sounding terms like Parsecs ‘cause Joe blow couldn’t give a rats, what a Parsec was, and why it was the incorrect use. Which required an, out of band (and decade’s late!), explanation to write off. However its the right kind of technobable for the kind of film the original trilogy was.
 
But, if I gave a false impression that Trek was superior in that facet, then what I ment to say was that its only very slightly ahead of the curve.

@AlsoSprachOdin  
That’s a strawman argument. He lists Star Trek right there as an example of sci-fi to take seriously. He is stating that Star Wars is not meant to be a very scientifically a curate since fiction series and should not be treated as such.

@Ichijoe  
>Spaceopera should be stupid and facetious.

I think a lot of ponies are forgetting the fact that Star Wars was meant to be a cheesy Space Opera in the vein of Buck Rodgers, or Commander Cody, and the Radar Men from the Moon. We we’re never ment to take it seriously, like Trek, That tries to stay somewhere in the world of known phyisics.

@Background Pony #ADB9  
Possible, but there were a lot of people giving their input for the first movies (why they were so good, supposedly), so it seems odd everyone would miss it. I kinda like the idea that Han was just ignorant, but considering he is a starship pilot that explanation doesn’t necessarily make any more sense…

@Whiteeyes  
That was the eventual explanation (IIRC, it was first introduced by an EU writer), but it’s very likely that Lucas just screwed up his terms when writing the original line.

@Eeveeinheat  
Parsecs were used when describing the Kessel Run because he was bragging about doing it in a hot amount of distance. What makes the run dangerous is the cluster of black holes in the area, so you have to go around them. The less distance the run took, the closer to the black holes you got.He was bragging about his skill, not his speed.

@Eeveeinheat  
What you are talking about is suspension of disbelief. The issue here isn’t the technological possibility of making a lightsaber (except for the parsecs thing), but the design of this particular one.  
What’s wrong with pointing out that if the stubs that connect the extra neon-lights to the handle should supposedly (for the cross-guard to be of any use) be able to stand up to contact with another light-saber, then it would be technically simpler and defensively more useful to just make a basket hilt out of whatever material they are made out of.  
Lightsabers are simple, everyone understands them, and awesome, so people naturally geek out about them.

@Background Pony #AF6C  
Most things in StarWars looks stupid or doesn’t make sense in regards to function, like almost every single thing in the movies, but this one thing is what riles everyone up? Why? How is this any more stupid than a laser being able to make a planet explode, magical space wizards, laser blasters moving slower than bullets, or using parsecs as a measure of time?

It’s a Sci-fi fantasy adventure, doesn’t excuse it for looking stupid

@Poptard  
The fact that he used Juyo to defeat his opponents with unrelenting fury also helped. There were benefits to saber staves when it came to power and leverage. Still, I agree that the problems outweighed the benefits. At least they aren’t as bad as force pikes. Even longer handle, as in an actual spear type shaft, with a standard length blade on the end. So many problems.

@Whiteeyes  
They’re actually horribly ineffective and extremely situational compared to regular lightsabers. The reason why Maul loved them so much was that they had long since fallen out of use by Force-Sensitives by the time he was around, thanks to aforementioned impracticality, and he was hoping to capitalize on the complete lack of experience anyone else had in fighting with this old weapon before he could cut off his own legs with it.