What I was trying to express in my first post but couldn't quite organize my thoughts around was this:

GL reserved that span of time in the Star Wars galaxy to tell the prequels, but that didn't stop authors like Zahn from referencing certain things long before George actually got around to making the PT. Then along comes TPM, and then three years later AOTC, and that's when people notice that it doesn't have much to do with anything that was previously mentioned.

Meanwhile, LFL launches that massive multimedia clone wars project with the six books, the genndy series, the comics, the digest comics, etc, and people got even more pissed as it became clear that GL intentionally left everything people wanted to see out of AOTC (tell me that's not the most commonly voiced complaint about the PT) just so he could make more money by spreading it out over that huge multimedia campaign. Cash grab though it was, the various creative minds behind it arguably did a better job than GL did with the prequels because they embraced what had come before in the EU and the OT.

See, after the Zahn trilogy hit in the early 90's it's almost like Star Wars fans got used to the universe being chronicled in that written medium. That and the fact it was limited by GL to only being post-OT didn't help lend him credibility, because by the time TPM was released it seemed even less connected to the OT than the actual EU did.