I've thought about it for many months and discussed it with friends, and the only way I see reasonably approaching the backstory while still keeping the bombshells of the OT intact is to make it a sequel series of movies that tells the events of the PT through a series of flashbacks as opposed to a straight forward series of events.
I think that really clears up a lot of issues in terms of storytelling logistics.

I've been working on my own fan-fic version of this, but I think it would be fun to see.