We do go from, "an extremely well put together little droid" to "your droid looks a bit beat up, you want a new one?" in a space of almost two decades of story time.

So while it may be that Artoo is not straight of the production line in TPM he is in mint condition (unlike my laptop) and fit for Royal use (in other words 'as good as').

While it might make for awful cinema how he uses his jets in ROTS, it makes sense to me at least that he has them because of the job he is designed to do.

Yeah he can magnetically cling to the surface of ships but not all components are going to be on cling-on-to-able surfaces.

That's where jets make sense (conceptually, not in the Super Mario sense they are used in the PT in it's current form).

And to me using jets to push someone to safety is no more different than using a stormtrooper grapple hook, a loose bit of rigging or driving a car up a slope to leap from one surface to another.

It's not flying if used in that way.

But this is as usual a pointless conversation because the jets aren't even going to be in PT:R.