I, for one, have never hated the PT. I think it is inferior and I hate the extended pod racing sequence and the droid factory sequence. But then I hate Greedo shooting as well which is the official edit of ANH. I original had some hate for Hayden at the end of ROTJ, but that has softened to just dislike. I wish they’d refilm that properly now that he is older. But they won’t.
When you really dive in you can find a lot of parallels between the PT and OT. They are deliberate. Lucas spoke several times about that. One of his reasons is that is how myths work. You have different generations experiencing similar situations. I think of the Arthur legends. The conflict of Uther’s day reignites when Mordred shows up. Things flow in cycles. It is the concept of the wheel of time found in the Indian subcontinent mythologies. And it is pretty obvious from some of the names that Lucas used that one of his influences was the subcontinent. And all you have to do is google Joseph Campbell’s monomyth to find charts that show a great circle of story points for the monomyth. In the PT we have the circle where Anakin fails to stand up to the evil and becomes its servant and in the OT we have the circle where Luke stands up to evil and is able to redeem his father. I think the conclusion of the ST is going to take that and have the next generation actually defeat the evil as Anakin should have done in the first place and end the cycle. I’ve never been certain just what Lucas had in mind for the ST, but the PT was clearly on his mind while moving on from ANH to TESB and ROTJ. But as he created the PT, some things continued to change to fit the story he wanted and some things in the OT don’t quite fit.
The one thing that a lot of people have issue with is Leia remembering her mother. I don’t. Leia is obviously force sensitive and picked up something from her mother in the womb. As many of us have confusing memories from when we were young (Luke making two throws with the grappling hook for instance), Leia may have confusing memories of a mother she never really saw with her own eyes. Lucas did a good job creating a character in ANH that fits with being Luke’s sister even if that wasn’t his original intention. But such surprising story revelation are common in myths. I’m curious if TROS will have some and if we can’t make another topic for that one after the film comes out (we can only intelligently discuss about half the ST because we don’t know how events in TROS might recolor what we have already seen as the revelation of Luke’s father and sister colored dialog and events in ANH and TESB).
One of the things I love about the PT is that Lucas was able to keep the public perception of Palpatine intact. Publicly it appears he is a pawn of all the special interest groups while in reality he is manipulating them to manipulate him into doing what he wants to do anyway. He plays the role of Palpatine while he really is Darth Sidious. We only get to see one scene of that as the rest of his term as Emperor we only encounter him in scenes where he doesn’t need to hide. Tarkin’s dialog about him is almost smug as he points out that regional governors (Tarkin himself) will wield the power the senate used to have. But the game is the same, with Palpatine diverting attention from him to others who can be blamed for wielding the power he has given them and who are doing his wishes. He is delightfully evil in all 6 films like a true villain of mythology.