Aside from the idea that I had, there is no way to put the droids in the PT without giving them some kind of a connection to the characters, which means they had connections to the characters from both sets of movies, which is just a bit of a stretch and almost always forced. And we get things like 3PO being built by Anakin in order to establish that forced connection. And then there's Boba Fett and the Stormtroopers. Yoda and Chewbacca. Anakin and Greedo (thankfully cut). He dropped the ball every time he tried to make connections to the OT, and it's because none of it made any damned sense! He makes the claim that you can't just drop a character into a story for no reason at all, but that's what he seemed intent on doing. Ben, Anakin, Palpatine, Owen, Beru, and Yoda are really the only established characters who had any business being in the prequels the way they ended up being written.