Turning Anakin into “School Shooter in Space” just pushes him too far into irredeemable, IMHO. I’d say the same thing about the kid bit in Kenobi as well (it felt gratuitous).
This is why the PT and OT are fundamentally incompatible, for me. There’s no universe in which I as an audience member would buy Anakin’s redemption if I knew he slaughtered children.
Twice.
If the editing was up to me, I would make the Sand People scene in AOTC a dream sequence that he later relates to Padme, and have the Temple massacre happen when Anakin is already on Mustafar.
I imagine that George pushed Anakin’s actions to such an extreme because of arguments which happened during ROTJ. I think this was from the Rinzler book, but other members of the team didn’t like the character of Luke essentially excusing his father’s genocide. George’s rebuttal was that this was a fairy tale with religious themes where anyone can be forgiven no matter what, and intentionally went about creating an irredeemable monster in the prequels to prove his point.
I think George gets it wrong, however. Of course in a Christian sense a person can be forgiven for any act, but that is between the sinner and God. Mere mortals aren’t expected to forgive atrocities, and not only is Luke mortal but he is the audience surrogate. For Luke to forgive his father is, in the context of the entire saga, for the audience to forgive the slaughter of children.
It wasn’t always like this. For twenty years, Luke in the OT was fighting for the ‘good man’ who was Anakin Skywalker.
“He ceased to be Anakin Skywalker and became Darth Vader. When that happened, the good man who was your father was destroyed.”
“There is still good in him.”
“He’s more machine now, than man…twisted and evil.”
Anakin in the OT was good up to the time when Luke was born, with his evil coinciding with the replacement of much of his body with metal. Anakin in the PT was a monster before the war. He was never a good man.