Most Anakin problems are rooted in Lucas’ late decision to age him down to single digits instead of letting him be a middle-school kid/pre-teen.

And honestly, his whole weird conception of the Jedi as super-repressed monks - which is only just now in the last 10 years getting seriously investigated as a terrible thing to have been in the first place. And frankly a massive disconnect from what he was alluding to in the first three movies. They were clearly samurai-ish, so there was obviously a code, but he turned them into deranged monks and then mandated we’re supposed to think of them all as good guys ANYWAY.

The truth is simply that he didn’t really have a handle on basics like characterization and plot when he came back from a self-imposed creative retirement, and he never got that handle he USED to have back. He wrote all his heroes like robots and undercut any real dramatic forward motion whenever he could, and instead of making it better he fell back on “I meant to do it like that, of course” and because he’s the CEO there’s nothing you can really say to that.

But yeah, if Anakin starts at age 13 you have so much more opportunity to infuse him with a roguish personality from jump, and it’s easier to build that forward in the next two movies. But instead you start him at 9 and now nothing about him makes a lot of sense, or reads as recognizable human behavior.

But then again choosing to make him more or less the main character of not just the prequel trilogy, but BOTH trilogies (by default) by retconning the story to be about Anakin Skywalker’s fall and redemption (even though he never actually GOT redeemed at the end of Jedi, he just did one good thing for his kid before dying) he also completely goofed. Anakin should have been a SUPPORTING CHARACTER at best, and the POV should have been either Padme or Obi-Wan. But it obviously would have never occurred to him to make the Prequel Trilogy be ACTUALLY about Luke & Leia’s mom, in the same way the Original Trilogy was about Vader’s kid. Not Vader.