Absolutely agreed, and your first two sentences condensate perfectly what I was trying to say.

I believe in the prequels Lucas would spend more time with a general story in mind rather than with actually the scripts of said stories, leading to the point where there were 2 or 3 (maybe even just 1?) drafts before one of them became the shooting script for The Phantom Menace, and something similar happened during the other prequels. Lucas, fully aware of his shortcomings as a writer, probably knew the scripts sucked, and we all did too. ~

IIRC Lucas wanted others to write/direct the PT? At least to rewrite his scripts à là Kasdan in ROTJ, TESB and RotLA. That’s why Jonathan Hales was brought on board for AOTC, but I think Hales barely had any time at all to do anything with the script though.

It’s interesting to notice that the human aspect tends to be difficult to George in most things he do, at least filmmaking wise: writing character dynamics and dialogue when script-writing or dealing with actors when directing.