It's hard to make comparisons because of the completely different circumstances in which SW and ESB were made. I guess you could say that the heart says SW, while the brain says ESB. Just consider that ESB was not immediately universally recognised as being great. But it's hard to maintain that when you consider the emotionally resonant moments in ESB. It's clearly not some incredibly cerebral film that you really need to think about. It's more likely that reviewers at the time were just idiots.

What might be interesting is to discard the traditional comparisons ("SW vs ESB", "ROTJ vs the previous two", "the OT films vs their prequel counterparts", etc.) and try to draw lines between the different films that are less evident.

For instance, both SW and ROTJ have endings that involve both a space battle, a lightsaber fight, and, in ROTJ, a big pitched battle on the ground. The prequels have this too, except for ROTS, which instead offers a battle at Coruscant at the beginning, and an overdrawn lightsaber battle and flashes of different Clone Wars battles and the Jedi being wiped out by Order 66 at the end. ESB similarly has the Battle of Hoth at the beginning (which is just to cover the Rebel escape anyway; at no point do they have any hopes of gaining any kind of victory against the enemy), and after that, it's much more character-focused. The confrontations of Luke vs Vader in ESB and Obi-Wan vs Anakin in ROTS take centre stage, while the war only rages on in the background.

Think about it. Throughout ESB after Hoth, the Empire is everywhere, and the rebellion is nowhere. Luke is at Dagobah, and the other main characters are on the run. Only at the end do they rejoin the Rebel fleet, and the wider story is resumed. It's remarkable how, in this sense, arguably the greatest film most closely resembles ROTS, which is just a giant turd. It strikes me how the last of the prequels, the "darkest" one, seems to take on the characteristics of the middle of the original films, also the "darkest" one, instead of resembling the last original film. Of course ROTS fucked everything up that ESB did right. So much for rhyming stanzas, Jorge!

The major difference is that the prequels were conceived of as a trilogy from the start, with the separation between them well-defined. With the originals, it's less clear because of the constant historical revisionism, but the least we can say is that SW can stand alone, and that revelations later in the series like "Leia is Luke's sister" were not immediately evident in 1977. No amount of insertion of Hayden Christensen and "NOOOOO!!!" can change the fact that the OT is much more disjointed and the three films differ from each other so strongly.

So picking favourites out of them is very much a matter of personal tastes and emotions, and it's hard to say anything definitive except that ROTJ was remarkably weaker, and that it already held some of the worst elements of the prequels. But by now the pendulum has swung so far to the other side that in these review aggregators, ROTS is now rated higher than ROTJ, which is extremely wrong-headed in my view, and ROTJ can now almost be considered underappreciated, considering that it still does a satisfying job for all its flaws.