Neither am I a prequel hater. I find them enjoyable and entertaining. I do, however, think them to be like a wicked stepmother who suddenly comes in and attempts to change your entire life around, and your wussy father just allows it to happen without raising a finger. Your big admiration of the prequels... or, sorry, the whole saga is that it fits together so well as one big story. To be honest, if the prequels had actually done that, I would have been impressed with them. If I had watched them and gone, "Wow. That's just like they always said it was going to be. I can see how that really expounds on what the original movies already told me was going to happen," then I would be completely satisfied with them. I still wouldn't consider them to be onecompletesagatobewatchedinnumericalorder because that's just silly. But any shmuck can artificially create continuity by putting patch jobs on his previous works when he suddenly comes to the much too late realization of, "Oh, wait. I just made this movie, and it doesn't fit what I said before." But prequels are always a very tricky business because it is so easy to contradict yourself with them. It takes a really excellent storyteller to be able to be able to work around what he already has to fit continuity and still tell the story he imagines. George just couldn't cut the mustard, so now he just pretends that he never made any mistakes, "Because, see the movies? See, I introduced Naboo in Return of the Jedi. I'd always planned that. Isn't it cool how I managed to get Hayden Christensen at the end of Return of the Jedi enen though he was a toddler then because I knew I'd be casting him a decade and a half later. It was all part of my vision. They fit together perfectly!"
Yeah, that's just silly, isn't it?