And I have no idea why you’re claiming that “most fans” rejected the rise of the Empire. Even the minority of people that still hate the prequels will admit that Revenge of the Sith has good moments of storytelling.
Yeah, you can also see this just with the box office results. The SW movies had diminishing returns from Empire to Jedi to Phantom to Clones…then Sith had a slight uptick.
TFA then had a MASSIVE jump to the second most popular SW film of all time…then dropped again with TLJ and then down even more with Rise. For reference:
https://i.redd.it/sa8ggtyqb4n51.png
Basically this means the “worst” SW films are, in order: Ep 2, Ep 9, Ep 3 and ep 8. There’s a huge gap between Ep 8 and the next highest, Jedi.
The prequels are not good movies overall, but at least they were thematically coherent. The characters were the same characters from Phantom to Sith. This was a serious problem with the sequel trilogy, and frankly would require a massive 3 movie edit to force coherency between the competing directors. I think TLJ and Rise COULD be massively edited together to make a better climax to the series, but that’ll be extremely hard for editors, particularly as people seem to be attaching their egos to their favorite/least favorite of the sequel trilogy and not really trying to see the bigger picture.