If you can actually give me some way of gauging just how many people thought these things "sucked" then maybe we can treat it like anything more than one of many opinions from the multitudes of people who paid to see TPM over and over again until it chimed in at 2nd highest world wide gross ever (at the time).
I'll grant you there were a lot of people who didn't like them. But I don't see how that makes them a "mistake" on Lucas' part.
I'm just saying that no matter what Lucas did, there would have been some fans that didn't like it. I'm not being unreasonable in that assumption am I?