>>23347882
It's an extremely by the book soft reboot (as was the style at the time) that introduced a bunch of plot threads that clearly (in retrospect) had zero thought put into how they'd actually be tied up. On its own, it's relatively inoffensive, aside from being a copy-paste of A New Hope that fails to move past the rebel-empire dynamic in spite of how the original trilogy ended. Taken with the rest of the trilogy, it's pretty bad.

>>23347892
I like the prequels, but the first two are not good movies by any means. George desperately needed a tard-wrangler/writer/director who actually knew what they were doing in the room. They did have some awesome setpieces though, and I am a big sucker for Obi-Wan. Also, like you said, they did serve as a good basis for EU material like books and vidya.

>>23347908
They obviously overdid it with the course-correction coming into the sequels, but it's still mind-boggling that Disney didn't have an overarching plan for the direction to take their billion dollar acquisition, especially since they were still enjoying the peak of the MCU.