Honestly, as much as I love Empire and Return of the Jedi and so much of the old EU, the original Star Wars film, the old Marvel comics, Splinter of the Mind's Eye, and the old daily Archie Goodwin comics really, to me, are just impeccably fun. The original movie is just so swash-buckling and fun, while at the same time it has a dark and mysterious backstory and is very much grounded in reality despite being a shameless fairy tale in space...

This leads me to my other thought. The original Star Wars, much like the first printings of The Hobbit (before LOTR and the Gollum scene change), is a fairy tale. Empire and Jedi are much more "dark" and "epic", and deal so much with darkness, notions of redemption, seduction towards evil. etc that they are much more "epic" than anything the original film and the pre-ESB "EU" offered. The same with how LOTR is so much more grave, embellished, and grand than The Hobbit which is such a "Wake up common people unaccustomed to adventure and excitement! Let's go get some treasure and have a jolly old time!" type of book. However, none of these changes are that bad. Empire and Jedi being much more "grand" and "epic" than Star Wars isn't a problem. The same with LOTR to the Hobbit. What is a problem is when the later story has to ret-con that of the original to make it fit in with the dark, grand scheme of the entire series which it spawned. Empire and Jedi did it a bit to Star Wars...and then the Prequels made the entire Star Wars franchise all about prophecies, virgin birth, fate and fulfillment, and quasi-scientific explanations for EVERYTHING...except for the prophecies and fate....(also Tolkien shouldn't have changed the Gollum scene in The Hobbit...it just doesn't fit the original story...although that's still so much less of an atrocity to the Special Ed. changes to the OT films).