The prequels were one gigantic missed opportunity, plain and simple. Return of the Jedi was arguably the beginning of the end. Lucas started taking more control, he had no counter, but at least he got another director to make it. How could sitting in the director's chair after 22 years actually be a good thing? It was Star Wars, and I think at the end of the day Phantom Menace will hold a place in my memory for at least being that movie we'd been waiting sooooo long for, but didn't quite live up to the level of the original trilogy. Duel of the Fates showing up on the simpsons 7 years later shows just how well people remember it, but yes, it was the highest grossing prequel simply because it was the first and there is no denying that. TPM and ROTS are passable but it's that useless middle act that pulls everything down. When I saw AOTC with my friends on opening day, and granted I'd been spoiled to death on the story, we were laughing a lot because it was the only way to alleviate how bad it really was. My friend sitting next to me even quoted Anakin's "but the women...and the children too" a few seconds ahead of him saying it because it was that predictable. The action scenes were ok, but it was distracting beyond belief to hear Johnny Williams' music from TPM being blatantly re-used in the Geonosis arena. It really is hard to argue for Lucas's desire to see everything finished when he goes about it in a borderline irresponsible way. The Empire of Strikes Back went down in history as one of the greatest independant film productions because it was a collaboration, not some kind of auteurism from Lucas.

As for this argument that there are more photographic miniatures in the PT than in the OT, fine, I'm sure there could be but it's not the tool that matters, it's the craft. Maddox did have a good point, the effects cease to be special when they're used in every single shot of the fraggin' movie. Lucas has deleted some of Peterson's work from the OT while only keeping his stuff from the PT. Replacing opticals with cgi would be considered good if they didn't look like they were made 20 years after the shots that were left in.