I love and respect George Lucas for creating Star Wars, for his tenacity, for his revolutionary work in film. He's got a vivid and fascinating imagination, and while in more recent years he's gone overboard with his ideas, he's done brilliant work in the past, and I can't help but admire him.
Of course, I don't respect his revisionism, or many of the choices he made with the prequels, but nobody's perfect, eh?