Right now the PT is kind of a hybrid of the two, it tries to focus on too many things at once and accomplishes nothing.
Pretty much - maybe Plinkett should've emphasized furthermore how the PT fails to be "Anakin's story" not only because of the bad characterization, and his exaggerated importance in the universe, but also because of how he wasn't established as a proaghtganist from the start. In TPM (the most redundant film in cinematic history - Palpatine could've just waited for Valorum's term to end), he was dramatically he least important character out of the main cast.
I guess that'd tied the theses in the reviews more tightly together, because now you look back at the previous reviews and how he complains about there being no single protagonist, and are left confused a bit. Not that the picture wasn't pretty obvious enough, anyway...
A list of characters/things that should have never been shown in the PT:
C3PO
R2D2
I disagree - maybe shouldn't have been there from the start, and certainly had anything to do with Anakin, but the OT left you wondering what the backstory was, how R2 had belonged to Kenobi (and Leia knew that) and C3 didn't know anything about that because they apparently befriended each other after that.
One's left to think they met each other some time after the whole Empire thing started. So that'd have been neat to explore, but the way it ended up in the movie, C3P0 is a single entire mess - WHY THE HELL WAS HIS MEMORY WIPED?
I love his dialogue in II, though - the few minutes between their landing on Geonosis and the factory sequence were pretty funny. OT style :D
Baby Greedo
Well, the dude got deleted.
Moff Tarkin
The dude looks like Odo.
Tatoonie should not have been in the movie until episode 3 and it should have just been for the moment we see baby Luke delivered there to Uncle Owen and Ant Pheru?
I have to vehemently disagree on that.
The PT completely ruined Owen and Beru by making them into cardboard cutouts that barely know Anakin, and just get the baby at the end because they don't have kids themselves. What a cop-out.
The OT suggests a much more interesting, archetypal story of two brothers, or maybe step brothers, or cousins, of whom one is eager and idealistic and the other prefers the stable quiet life as a simple farmer. One is "the Owen", the other is "the Luke". Would've been also a nice piece of "rhyming" by Luke being a sort of a hybrid between the two, and then choose his father's path.
At the very least, Owen and Beru are hinted to know Vader's backstory in the IV scene, so having them involved more into Anakin's downfall, or at least observing it to some extent, would've been neat.
Could've all played out on Tattoine, too.
The way it ended up, Obi Wan probably spouted off some expository dialog, Owen went like "oh, that dude who once visited us at our farm! the one that looks like Christopher Lambert?", and then they started feeding lies to their adoptive son.
Not a plot hole as such, but yaaaaaaaaaawn. All leads me to suspect that the prequels were either Lucas' attempt at making some sort of profound statement on how history is distorted by hearsay (who knows, maybe his parents told them half truths and BS about his granddads, and then he got a look into their diaries?), or were, indeed, a huge practical joke.