SilverWook said:

I think Lucas simply changed his mind between the trilogies. Tatooine was more of an old West analogy in the OT. You had homesteads, saloons, shootouts, traders, and bandits who would attack unwary travelers. Even the rifle Luke pulls out of the Landspeeder before the sandpeople attacked looks like a prop from a western.

This is one of the main reasons the revision of Mos Eisley in the Special Edition always felt so wrong for me (even aside from the goofy droids and Jawa hijinks). Mos Eisley felt like either a town in the old West — or a village in ancient Japan that Toshiro Mifune might be walking through. It wasn't a place that you really wanted to go unless you had to.

It formerly reinforced that Tatooine was a $#!+hole, now, between the busier Mos Eisley and the frankly metropolitan Mos Espa, Luke just seems like that much more of a whiner when he complains about living on Tatooine. It also takes quite a bit away from the ‘hero from nowhere’ concept that Lucas had based his story on.