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What was accomplished in the OT with sets, matte paintings, costumes, and models is timeless, and is one of the many reasons why those movies are beloved,
I want to add this--it wasn't so much that the stuff was all models and mattes, it was that THE WAY they filmed it was so new. Motion control cameras and optical printing techniques. The NEWNESS of it is what really carried it over the top. The newness and the ambition of it. The next closest comparison would be Jurassic Park, and then probably Toy Story.
Thing is you go back to those movies now, with the newness wore off, and you can see the seams. Not just some of the time--ALL of the time.
BAD EFFECTS rip you out of the movie, period. DATED EFFECTS as well. There's plenty of effects that are pulled off well, they're just old as crap. Hell, King Kong's stop motion was pulled off astoundingly in 33, so much so that people glossed over the mostly horrid acting and pacing (honestly) but you look at it now, and you REALLY have to distance yourself from the movie to appreciate it less as a flick and more as a historical document. That's not to say I want King Kong remade with a bunch of CG effects and Animatronic models (although that's what we're getting) but dated effects DO get in the way.
The original trilogy has a LOT of dated effects. And they're just as jarring for people watching it the first time as people watching King Kong for the first time. They dont' jar to us because we spend unholy amounts of time watching them over and over and over.
The anti-CG bias has always been interesting, because half the time, people don't really know what's CG and what isn't. Not just in the Star Wars movies, but in a lot of effects heavy shows. It depends on whether you carry this bias into the theater and have trained yourself to look for it. I can spot it, but I try to recognize that these are the tools the director has chosen to use, and then go from there. That doesn't mean CG gets a pass, just like crappy matte-work and modeling and cheese costumes didn't get a pass in the mid-80's. Just because it's tangible doesn't mean it's automatically better. And to say that the Original Trilogy is loved because they used models is fallacious. The Original Trilogy is loved because it was a right time/right place kind of movie that was so NEW at the time that it really impacted people. The marketing genius is what kept these movies fresh, the repackaging and ancillary markets and merchandising and reselling and reselling, so that effectively, you never LEFT the time period the movies originally came out. The marketing always trapped you there.