Out of the Prequel Trilogy, Episode I is the best in the sense of models. They actually built ships and vehicles. Which is cool. If you were acting in the movie, you could actually say that you sat behind the wheels of a pod racer. Now all they do is have somebody sit on a blue cloth and act like their flying a ship, and they just animate the fighters.
When you film with physical models, you feel like you're part of the scene. And even if you can't get the ship model to look like it's flying correctly, it at least looks real. What looks better? A model that doesn't have have quite the right movement but looks real, or a ship that flies correctly but looks completely fake? I personally like the first choice.