Lucas' role in the prequels should have been the same as Empire Strikes Back:

Write the story and pay for it, let other people do the rest.

Instead, he decided to write and direct it all by himself (Jonathan Hales co-wrote the Clones screenplay, credit where credit's due).

The Special Edition in '97 was Lucas going "I am the auteur of these movies even though I only directed one of them."

But that's the thing. Giving the OT an update in the form of the SE wouldn't have been so bad if it didn't mean going onto a PT where close to every last shot has some sort of cgi effect in it. It's pretty ridiculous when you consider how each of the original films only had a year of post-production whereas the prequels had two years.