I certainly think people have every right to like them or hate them. Yeah, it is truly a shame so many SW fans complain about the PT, because keystrokes save lives. Those keystrokes could have been used to feed countless starving children in the world. Those keystrokes could have been digging wells in South Africa.
I think people have plenty of right to hate them too. I grew up acting out the prequels with my action figures. My Return of the Jedi Luke with the one gloved hand always played the part of Anakin as he hunted down and killed various other figures who I pretended to be Jedi, since at that time there were only a hand full of Jedi. You would be amazed how many times my Luke figure killed my Sebastian Shaw figure (who was often choosen to play randon jedi). Back then there was only one lightsaber and that was my black handed Luke's green one. So I made other sabers out of colored paper clips, this way I could twist them around the figure hand so they could hold it.
So in other words, the prequels were played out millions of times with my figures, I dreamed of the prequels for years and had way too high expectations for them. After 1997 my expectation fell considerably, so you would have thought I would have been well prepared. I feel I have every right to dislike them. It is not that they didn't turn out to be the exact movies I played out with my SW toys when I was a kid, I never expected them to match the stories I had imagined up. It is that I have never waited so long for or invested as much interest in any up coming movie before, after all of that the prequels didn't only not live up to expectations, they were not only a let down, not only not as good as the originals, they SUCKED! They were magical world of disney or made for TV movie kind of quality.
It is not the point of "what better things would I have done with the 6+ hours spent watching them" but rather the extremely long wait for something followed by disappointment. It is that these are movies I REALLY wanted to like. Even if they were bad I REALLY wanted to like them. But they are SO bad I cannot justify liking them at all. It is pretty obvious what they really are, a squeezing of the teats of the cash cow till they are raw and nothing more, they were never intended to be anything more than just that.