Ah, you saw the prequels first - that explains why you're much, much, much more willing to preserve some of George's ideas than we are.

To me, the PT took everything I loved about the OT and made it pretty much irrelevent. The Jedi were NOTHING like they were depicted in the originals, the Republic wasn't a Republic, and the Clone Wars made no sense, among other problems (i.e. the whole movies feeling like the Endor and Tattooine scenes of ROTJ, a flawed film I'm working on fixing for my first fan edit).