I agree that The Phantom Menace was by far the very best of the PT. If only we had known back in 1999 that things would only get worse instead of better, we could have snuffed out our hopes back then and given up on it all completely and been happy with the thought that we would be saving money on not buying tickets for the next two installments.

I really do think TPM is better than the other bits of the PT, but it is still kind of a "Hmm, I think I would rather eat moldy bread, than bread laced with deadly poison" sort of a better.

To me, TPM has the most SWesque moments to it, as well as the most potential. For all it got wrong, there was a lot of good there. I still absolutely love the Duel of the Fates. The original music by John Williams was amazing, and the high paced three way sword fight was a lot of fun to watch. The space battle, as lame as it was accented with bad actors for pilots in silly costumes that couldn't convince you to care if their character bites the dust or not even if their lives depended on it, was still very reminiscent of OT battles, far more so that anything we'd every see again.

Even the blaster fight between Padme and her men and the Trade Federation at the end was way more like scenes from the OT than anything else in the PT. Theed on Naboo felt like a real place you could imagine yourself visiting. Try to picture yourself on the Wookie homeworld from Ep3? Can't, because it was essentially a setting out of a cartoon. It didn't feel real or tangible. Nor did Geonosis.

These are the reasons I liked TPM. If I were to go on about what I didn't like about it, the post would be about three times as long.