walking_carpet said:

its one thing to say characters cannot be one way or another - but the characters in the PT have no depth and are not remotely compelling (except maybe palpatine).

IMO Palpatine was compelling because he had to be in order to remain consistent with the original trilogy.

That's the way I feel about a lot of good things from the prequel trilogy, like the battle on the lava and Anakin turning from good to bad- it had to be that way because of the OT- the skeleton of the story was already written.