I thought the detail was intricate and well rendered for a peice of science fiction fantasy. I don't think anything Lucas did with these films was primarily motivated by a desire to show off his new effects. He has employed cutting edge, freshly invented SFX techniques since the very beginning. It seems pretty obvious to me that a lot of thought was put into it, even if you refuse to believe it.

Wow, Wikipidia has a decent writeup about it from the same visual dictionary stuff I was looking at here.