That’s an assumption, not an answer. And with a man as slippery as George Lucas - who makes “experimental films” in private that have so far never been publicly seen - it’s a fair question.
I always found that to be a bullshit excuse from Lucas. To me he has zero interest in “experimental films” and more interest in milking the same franchise too many times to count. He is a man with very limited scope who claims to be avant-garde when he is nothing more than a lucky idiot. He’s bitter because he couldn’t remake his beloved Flash Gordon and had to use his brain to make something original. Then he became even more resentful when smarter people could make better films than him, so he fired everyone who made the franchise great, and made four bad films that are still today black marks for Star wars fans. The only silver lining he got out of this is the merchandising, which was his true calling all along.
In other words george lucas had too big of an ego and clout at the time and probable thought he was the best writer in the world. which is too bad because jedi and the prequels would have been great. If he didn’t have a bunch of yes men who didn’t have the balls to question all of the problems with the scripts. Though the only thing i do really like about jedi is han didn’t die like Harrison ford wanted,the emperor and maybe some other things but that’s it.
But still he shouldn’t have taken out his frustrations on his fans like this. The franchise has been ruined ten times longer than it was good.
I know right i wish someone had the balls to stand up to him and tell him this wasn’t going to work. Me i think if jedi and 1,2,3 were ether miniseries or seasons with each season being these four episodes it would have had room to breath.
There wasn’t enough story in the prequels to cover even one movie. Jedi really isn’t that bad either, but if they just didn’t fire Kurtz years earlier, we would’ve had a perfect trilogy.