Yeah, the PT's lack of explanation is very offthrowing for a new viewer. The audience can gather that these are super-human soldier-monks of some kind, but its just too much left unsaid, and the viewer will take a very different view of the jedi--for instance the first scene of TPM, instead of looking at it the way we do and seeing these mystical knights channelling the cosmic energy of the Force into enhanced abilities they will just view them as superheros who can jump and levitate and break through shit because they "just can," sort of like comic-book Supermen. Additionally the dialog is rife with heavy religious philosophy on the nature of the Force--for us, who know what is being said, it is hard enough to keep up; i mean one of the bigger complaints about the PT was that there was so much banal expository dialog about the technical matters of the Force and et cetera--and these complaints are made by people who fully understood what is being talked about. Without a proper "this is what a jedi is, this is what the Force is, this is how things are," the film will be literally inpenetrable to any viewer. AOTC is bad enough as it is, but without understanding the Force, other than "it must be some superpower energy", the film might as well not even be watched. The PT was very, very obviously made with the OT in mind, assuming that people already know everything that was in those films, and ironically Lucas' attempts to make a series that can viewed in order collapsed right from the get-go. Additionally, the "explanation" in Episode IV would be too little too late--by that point, why even bother explaining things? Theres no reward or advantage by that point because everything that comes after that point is already known by the viewer--the jedi were guardians of the old republic, use "the Force" which is the source of their powers and use "lightsabers" and that there is a dark side to the Force that is seductive and can lead you to evil. The only new point gained by the whole exposition at that point is that the force is an energy generated by all living things, but at that point the viewer would have probably pieced that together as well. Unfortunately, any viewer who could still semi-coherantly follow the theology of the jedi by that point would not need any of the exposition, and it would just slow the film down by re-telling the viewer obvious stuff that is already shown in the previous three films.