I would have preferred to have seen the Jedi being divided more in their interpretation of the the discovery of 'the chosen one'.

I could see a section of the council seeing this as really bad news.

For a thousand generations or so they have had relative peace so they must have assumed the Sith were gone for good but if the chosen one is meant to destroy the Sith that implies that there are Sith to be destroyed and if the status quo has been relatively speaking ok that would mean bringing balance to the Force would imply changes which would disturb that imbalanced but relatively peaceful situation.

Others would great it as a good thing like the coming of a messiah and others would be pragmatic about the ambiguities of prophecy.

If some of the nonsensical exposition was removed it would leave room for new characters to provide better narrative driven exposition which could provoke the audience to think about where the story could be going and better understand the natural divisions in the Jedi community.

That would be much more interesting than taxation and generally muddled worries about uncertain futures.

In the current PT we only get the bit about destroying the Sith in the final film anyway so it would make sense to put both sides of that plot strand on the table in the first episode (if the strand is there at all) than leave it to the final part.

We never even find out (outside the EU) where this prophecy came from in the first place (did the Sith plant it there for less rainy day?)

The Star Wars universe is a fantasy led cousin to the Duneiverse and the problems caused by limited prescience (or even total prescience) feature well enough in that story.

What the PT needed was to have a coherent but simplified version of that theme or to drop the whole prophetic strand altogether.

If that is dropped do you replace it with something else or just have a shorter film?