It may not be as great as if the prequels themselves were as compelling to many of you on it's own, but it's at least a start. At the end of the day, you guys are choosing to entertain the prequels, even if mostly because of the merit of the classic trilogy.
And it seems most of you agree that while you may not think the execution was all that great, that the story points Lucas hung the prequels on are substantial in the way they relate to the classic trilogy at the very least.
Some have brought up the idea that the prequels never grabbed them, or didn't pass the "sleep test". I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that we had seen the classic trilogy already and knew damned well that Palpatine was a bad guy and that Anakin would fall from grace and even become Darth Vader.
But Lucas was creating the prequels intentionally to be the beginning of the story, not the end of the story that explains events of the past in flashback. The prequels play it off like Palpatine is really a good guy in TPM and while there are some uneasy moments with Palpatine in AOTC (like where Yoda looks at him with a puzzled look) but by and large, the narrative doesn't reveal that Palpatine is the Sith lord until ROTS. Likewise, episode I and II really utilize Anakin as a hero.
I think this made at least the first two prequels into an exercise of "waiting for the Sith to hit the fan". We see all the players, we know what's going to happen, so the feeling is like: Well let's get on with it already.
One thing I was able to do that really improved my appreciation for the characters and their plight in the prequels was to force myself to unlearn what I had learned about the outcome in the classic trilogy. Short of a partial lobotomy that's really impossible, but I endeavored to consider how I might feel about the story if I took the stance that Anakin was the hero and that for all I knew he might prevail in the end.
I found that when I looked at TPM as the story of the Trade Federation's invasion of Naboo instead of the beginning of the story of Darth Vader, I was able to invest myself in that movie's resolution better. In AOTC, I went into the romance without constantly reminding myself that it would all end badly, and I didn't go out of my way to incriminate Palpatine with that one camera shot at the funeral in the end.
It sounds silly, but I ended up really giving a huge crap about all the characters. I ended up rooting for them all the way up until it all falls apart in ROTS, and I have to tell you, I ended up an emotional wreck the first time I saw ROTS. As someone mentioned earlier it was like a nightmare that the characters couldn't wake up from, and by the end of it, I was just about spent.
And then the release of the final montage with Luke and Leia being delivered was sort of like an angel coming down to wipe my tears away as if to say: It's all going to be all right.
Maybe it sounds silly, but I have never felt as much emotion in a film as I felt in ROTS on opening night.