The unlikability of the Jedi as portrayed in the PT is the culmination of a process that seemed to start with TESB. In SW77 the Jedi are portrayed as a sort of intergalactic police; a cross between The Knights of The Round Table, the Samurai, and The Lensmen. In Empire we get the warrior monk view of the Jedi. I guess Lucas preferred this view…but I prefer his original concept.
I like it better too with the caveat that I don’t think ESB is where it started.
People say that about ESB because Yoda and Obi Wan tell Luke not to go save his friends. Some things with that:
- Not at all the same thing as the prequel prohibition on attachments. They never told him to not have friends or that having friends was wrong or not to get too attached to people.
- In this scenario they were absolutely right to tell him not to go: it was a trap, he lost his hand, his friends got away anyway without him, and he almost died (tried to commit suicide to get out.) The only thing questionable the Jedi do is Obi Wan not telling him that Vader is his father.
They’re still the same all the way through the original trilogy and remained the same in the expanded universe all the way until The Phantom Menace. The Tales of the Jedi comics and all the books (which Lucas signed off on!) depict them as decentralized knights in the context of sort of feudalism where they can take sides in conflicts and they work directly for monarchs, such as queens.
The prequels tried to bridge that it a weird way by having elected monarchs that are really just representatives or senators, and turning the Jedi into a cross between the FBI, secret service, diplomats, and modern military officers that are all centralized on the single capitol planet where they’re essentially a branch of government unto themselves.