I really liked FOTR at the time, and still prefer it to what we actually got. Though imagination and our projections in filling in the blanks often triumphs reality. I’d love to see an animation or comic book form of it, even fan made, but then is so much of that early “what if?” stuff I’d like to see, along the lines of “The Star Wars” comics from 2013/14.
A common element across most fan speculation about the Prequels is that our imaginations concocted stories almost entirely based on elements from the OT. Things like Alderaan, Captain Antilles, spice mines of Kessel, etc. But Lucas obviously wanted to make the Prequels unique, with new settings, new characters, and completely unexpected plot developments. And since it was Lucas’ creativity and imagination that created Star Wars in the first place, it seemed likely that he would come up with amazing new things that far surpassed the mediocre imagination of the average fan.
And indeed he did come up with lots of new, unexpected stuff. Things like Gungans, mysterious clone conspiracies, a “chosen one” prophecy, Qui-Gon Jinn, General Grievous, Dexter Jettster, pod racing, etc. I mean, who could have expected that Episode I would go in an entirely bizarre direction - telling a Kurosawa-influenced side story about two Jedi Knights protecting a young Queen from evil invaders - a story almost completely unrelated to anything that happens in the OT. Lucas obviously wanted to flex his creative muscles, defying fan expectations to such a degree that the whole thing came off as wacky instead of cool. In retrospect, the pre-Prequel fan expectations - derivative and straightforward as they often were - sound like a much better “rough sketch” for the Prequels than what we ultimately got.
Out of that list of unexpected stuff, the only thing that was universally liked and well handled (maybe) was podracing. “At least it did something different” is always a bad excuse for this kind of thing.
That’s not a bizarre direction for episode 1 at all. You’re not winning any points by namedropping “Kurosawa-influenced” by alluding to The Hidden Fortress when the original Star Wars in 1977 was already drawing on that setup so heavily. If anything the prequels ruined those elements by making the Jedi the FBI instead of samurai.
The developments weren’t that unexpected given that they are prequels and some of the material was already written. Everyone knew going in that Anakin would become Darth Vader, Obi Wan would be a main character and train Anakin, the Emperor would be a main character and corrupt Anakin, the Emperor and Vader would kill the Jedi minus Yoda and Obi Wan, Luke and Leia’s mother would be a main character and some kind of royalty, and Luke and Leia would be born and get hidden from Vader. It’s not really fair to any fans or writers to say that they had a failure of imagination for sticking to what was already well established, especially given that writers were explicitly prevented from detailing very much about the prequel era.
For Alderaan specifically, it makes much more sense for Alderaan to be a part of the story than for Anakin to be from Tatooine, which was something Lucas chose to do over. He did re-use a lot of ideas and imagery, it’s just that people nowadays credit that to Ring Theory or something rather than a lack of imagination or to fanservice.
I probably wasn’t clear enough, but that list of “unexpected stuff” was supposed to be a list of stupid things, not well-handled things. I mean, I included Dexter Jettser in there, which I thought made it obvious I was listing stupid stuff in the Prequels. The main point I wanted to make was that fan theories about the Prequels were way more derivative of the OT than Lucas’ actual Prequels, but that this was probably a good thing because, in practice, Lucas’ original ideas turned out to be so ridiculous/wacky that OT-derivative fan ideas probably would have been way better.
And I agree about Alderaan. I’ll never understand why Lucas created Naboo instead of just using Alderaan as one of the principal settings.