Doesn’t make up for the fact that the rest of the score is mostly pretty boring, honestly.
I don’t think it’s any more boring than ROTS. A big part of what I’m considering for my ranking is the relative strength of the themes introduced in each film, and on those grounds Sith is absolutely the loser.
No doubt about that. ROTS pretty much only has Grievous’s theme and Battle of the Heroes, the former being merely serviceable and the latter a set piece more than an actual theme. AOTC’s non-Across the Stars themes aren’t much either (one for Kamino, one for the Separatists, and then one for the monsters which barely counts because it was mostly cut out), but Across the Star is really freaking good.
Still, for me, it’s a lot of factors that push ROTS over. The biggest being that AOTC has almost a complete cut and paste job for its climax (both films suffer from this but it really doesn’t get any worse than the battle of Geonosis). The other being that ROTS is just more enjoyable an experience to listen to on its own. Sure, it’s way over the top, but taken as its own thing, separate from the other SW scores, it works really well actually. There are some good expanded score edits of both of them out there and I find ROTS a much more fulfilling listen than AOTC.