I liked the prequel because of the mirror between Luke and Anakin. Luke had friends, a caring loving family, was born into royalty but grew up in the slums, his teachings were to be his most self and he had agency in how he wanted his destiny to turn out, not being pressed into a box of expectations and limitations. The list goes on but I always loved the idea George Lucas had, felt like he just needed to solidify his ideas a bit more
The issue was making them about Vader at all. He was just some lackey who was the protagonist’s dad, that doesn’t mean you need three movies of back story on how he got there.
If you want to do that, then you need to make them far more emotionally invested films because they are just a cavalcade of inept decisions.
Lucas was excellent at big picture things, but should have been kept out of the details. Particularly dialogue
Way I heard it, he was well aware of that and actually tried to get people who would slap him down as necessary, but didn’t manage it.
It was also the result of inexperienced actors.
In the OT the actors would regularly be like “I don’t think this line sounds good let’s with this instead”
But in the PT everyone just went along with everything due to lack of experience and not wanting to be hard to work with/think they’re better than the director