Well the prequels and the special editions are not so bad. As long as you don't mind watching 12 hours of video game footage, that destroys the original star wars trilogy and put it on the fast track to being a fucking joke rather than two stellar and one really good but kinda flawed film.
The novelists took weak material and made it a little bit better. It is almost universally agreed that the novelizations of the prequel trilogy were better than the films. Still not being good literature or good books but any stretch of the imagination. Their is a reason tie in fiction gets a bad reputation when people could choose to read real literary science fiction or fantasy, they choose something that is a bit of cheat. Something based on a television show or a movie.
Everybody has their own opinion. I just don't see the prequels as being anything but the blockbuster, of the week, month or year they were released if even. 30 years from now i don't think they will be remembered as classic films. While the original trilogy still will be in its original form, even if fans can't watch it how they want to see it.
That prequels come out of a more detached and jaded modern sensibility and therefore do not mesh well with the original films. Lucas own politics, philosophy and belief systems may have also changed between the making of return of the jedi and the phantom menace which led to this disconnect in continuity between the films.
As well as his philosophy of how movies should be made, edited and what place visual effects have in them.
I don't think the evoke the same fanaticism and devotion the original trilogy did or quite spark the imagination of millions of young people in the same way. They are bubblegum pop films without any redeeming value, they are like junk food. And once the visual effects have been surpassed which was their only strong suit not the characters or stories, they will be forgotten and swept under the rug.
I am as guilty as others for liking and being entertained by some films that are only mind numbingly bad entertainments full of cgi, like Stargate and ID4. But i would not pretend them to be classic films by any stretch of the imagination. The prequels get even worse scrutiny because they dare to call themselves "star wars" films. It takes more than cardboard cutout characters sci fi and fantasy tropes, and dudes wearing cloaks and kiminos and wielding laser swords to be a star wars film.
But bespite criticisms of the prequels at the end of the day the world of film is still a much more interesting place because of George Lucas. Films like Lord of The Rings by Peter Jackson would not exist if not for Lucas pioneering the key digital effects technologies utilised in making modern movies and films.
Before the existence of these new technologies a book like tolkiens was unfilmable.
Just like movies like the Watchmen film that is upcoming would have been unfilmable because they either could not do the effects traditionally or it would have been cost prohibitive or looked fake. Like a guy in a blue rubber suit or makeup instead of a digital character that lives and breathes on the screen.
Still you can have breathtaking digital creations on screen and without a solid script and story it all falls apart.
If Howard the Duck was made today for instance and instead of a man in a rubber suit you had a digital character like Jar Jar it would still suck because the concept sucked and so did the script.