I personally think the big mistake was having the OT characters that were alive in the PT era as the main focus of the PT.

If Anakin, Obi-Wan, Palpatine, Owen, Beru etc were background figures you could set the story at an angle where the events still played out but you were emotionally invested in characters that OT fans wouldn't yet know the fates of.

You could even have had more than one potential candidate for the role of mother to Luke and Leia.

The droids could be together and play the same sort of role as they do in the OT because they are droids, the universe doesn't really notice them.

That way you could have obscured Vader's identity, never showed Yoda and have genuine tension by caring for a group of characters that may or may not survive the last movie of the PT.

So played in either as PT>OT or OT>PT the narrative would still work.

Making the Jedi the focus of the PT was a huge mistake because we already know they all dead bar two in the OT.

It then becomes a case of rubbernecking the sinking Titanic.