Forgive me for being potentially ignorant, but did the SE really add THAT much to the originals in terms of "effects"?
Sure, there are matt paintings replaced by similar looking CG landscapes or something, but I mean essentially?
ESB only has the Wampa (who was terrifying when not seen on screen, but now just kinda looks funny), and... anything else? ROTJ has, um, that one song in Jabba's palace replaced, which wasn't as disturbing in effects overload as it was in style.
SW had that Mos Eisley arrival bit, which was stupid, few giant cows walking around the screen, stormtroopers inexplicably riding giant cows... and... wasn't that shot with the departing X-Wings way cool? Then a few added stormtroopers in the death star... maybe a few weebo robots flew by thee stormtroopers here and there (which is really not that much of a stretch from that toy car in the DS later on)... anything else that's significant?
Just to throw it out there, the OT wasn't entirely guiltless when it comes to "action scenes for the sake of it", either - for example, the Death Star segment would've been a lot more believable and suspensful had they not cramped like 10 shootout scenes into half an hour, each of which is a major contributor to the stormtrooper meme.
But they went for cool, actioney swashbuckling, and way, it added fun, but took away a good portion of seriousness and suspense. "Alternative to fighting", yea?
Then, the TIEs attacking the Falcon... not that out of place, but it's just kinda thrown at us with questions like "did those guys go voluntarily on a suicide mission? or are they pussies like the rest?", and then at the end they're all like "we diid iiiit!!" as if they knew no more fighters would come chasing them... dunno, felt more like an excuse to have a super cool space battle scene than anything else.
The dogfight at the end I found unnecessarily stretched out and boring - obviously a show-off of some degree, as well.
Then, the robot camel attack on Hoth... now, the main point is that the rebels get attacked and eventually flee towards a new base - there is no tension involved in the rebels' escape, because they just breeze through the "blockade" or whatever in like 10 seconds, and the rest is just a lot of flying around and fighting - Luke pulls off some cool tricks and blows up two space camels, the rest is just background fighting and at the end, the Empire kinda wins - do we ever see the camels win and eradicate all the attackers, though? At the end, Luke and a few other pilots are just chillin' in the snow without worrying about anything, so my impression of that battle was that it had a bit too little consequence and tension involved. The main heroes flee, the majority of the rebellion makes it... to a space base that never gets attacked or even found by the Imperials from there on.
Again, had they focused on the escape and evacuation and a bit less on bringing down camels with cool tricks, with no avail at the end, I guess it would've turned out better narratively. We also wouldn't be laughing at the somewhat funny-looking robot camels today.
Then, the asteroid chase sequence - again, this time clearly no one's trying to "let them escape", and they just send 4 TIE fighters? Who look like pussies and crash into the first asteroid that happens to float on their way? Why not send like 20 of them, there would've been enough left to at least track the ship to the dinosaur's belly, but then again, we couldn't have had that prolonged and completely absurd and pointless scene inside the monster, right?
Again, feels more like just an action scene pushed into the movie for the sake of it, and I can't say I felt any tension watching it, either.
But none of that compares to how useless most of the PT action is in relation to its necessity to the plot - sure, not all of them, but a very good chunk.