i don’t think you need to go out of your way to introduce padme. her first scene with anakin says a lot by itself, as in that their marriage is secret because the jedi don’t allow it. you don’t need to throw everything at the viewer right away. and we don’t need to know that they’ve known each other for so long, just that he loved her very much, enough to become darth vader in order to save her.
you could explain the clone wars in the crawl, and i think that’d solve many of the issues. heck, dooku doesn’t really need much of an introducing either.