I wasn't saying that Lucas should have ONLY used puppets (although i do prefer a puppet yoda, sue me). What I'm trying to say is, everything was so digitally overblown that even the clone STORMTROOPERS were CG! Real live humanoids were CG characters! What's worse, in episode 3, instead of putting Temuera Morrison in a stormtrooper outfit when they took off their helmets, they pasted his head onto a digital CG body. This, in my opinion, was too much. It was lazy. It looked bad. His head keeps floating off his body at the neck. It was really obvious.
He should have built sets and backgrounds. He should have made Padmé eat real fruit in Episode 2.
In any case you're missing my point that each frame of these movies (especially Episodes 2 and 3 where the CG was used extensively) will age. If George had used a nice balance his films wouldn't age so quickly.
As a side note: one thing that really bugs me about the use of CG in modern films is the fact that people go all crazy with it in terms of cinematography. "Oh look! We can do this ariel shot, swoop in under his crotch, catch some lens flare. A big spider will appear and his tenticles will swoop towards the protagonist and it'll miss and instead....hit the camera!" Granted it helps create shots that were never before possible, but is it a good thing? Is it a good thing to do whatever you can? Even at the expense of losing your audience's suspension of disbelief?
Example: that fight scene between Neo and those hundred Agent Smiths in Matrix Reloaded. Perfect example of CG hyperbol.
Counterexample: The original Matrix. Award-winning special effects. Why? They were amazing at the time! And in many respects, they hold up today. That infamous shot of neo ducking the bullets at the end was a mixture of live footage and computer animation. A nice blend of it too. Had they more money, I'm sure the directors would say, "Hey! Let's just make that whole shot CG because we can. It gives us freedom!" But would the original Matrix been as good had they had all the resources in the world?
This is what I call the Kevin Smith syndrome. For some reason Kevin Smith makes crappier films the bigger his budget is. Clerks and Chasing Amy were decent flicks which cost 20, 000 and 200, 000 dollars respectfully. Do these films compare with the bigger budget films such as Dogma, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and even Mallrats? I personally don't think so. Why? Limitations are good for a director. Limitations make you sit down and think, "OK, how can I do this with the little resources I have?" They force you to use all the grey matter in your little head to come up with solutions. Computers have erased this. Everyone's mentality is, it seems, "Fix it in post." They get lazy. They start not caring about how the film. "it's good enough"...enough. Just enough. Goddamnit! Strive for perfection!