Mielr said:

As far as hating Lucas for what he's done to the series, I don't "hate" him, but I am royally pissed at him. The Prequels sort of sully the whole franchise- to the extent that they are able to. They're not taken as seriously and they're not as loved as the OT, so I guess they can only damage the legacy of the OT so much.

I'm far more upset about the Special Edition vs OOT situation, because I can
ignore the prequels, but it's hard to ignore the SEs since the OOT hasn't been
given a proper release.

and that's the funny part, I didn't have all that much of a problem with Star Wars in general until May of '06.

Seriously, even back in summer of '05 when my friend and I showed the OT to a friend of ours who'd never seen it before. I brought my silver box over to his place, we watched and it was awesome. awesome.

This is where I point to as evidence that Lucas has not 'ruined' the OT. It would take a whole lot more than that to ruin it.

Zombie, it sucks to read that and think of what might have been. On the other hand, it's interesting as hell to see how things worked and played themselves out. Seeing as how Lucas did end up coming back and doing the prequels, I certainly wouldn't mind seeing another Star Wars trilogy every couple of decades. I can't see Lucas being against this (at least in principle) and unless he writes it into his will there won't be anything he'll be able to do about it anyway. Heck, maybe he could even pitch a story for it and let other people write the screenplay. He has had some sort of involvement with the course of the EU. Maybe he would only end up insisting that Episodes VII and onward couldn't be made because of how he's re-worked them into the post-Jedi EU, but even then it would be cool for him to come up with a story within the midst of that (maybe that huge 100 year gap in the legacy era?) for 7, 8 and 9. After all, Lucas has always been working in the cinematic medium first and foremost.