@Bingowings: I don't think Luke's "I'm never coming back" line should be twisted to be ironic. He's simply never intending to return as he has no reason to. If later he has a reason, he will come back. The problem with returning to Tatooine for me is that it limits creative decisions for ROTJ.

@darth_ender: I could buy the idea that Tatooine had some sort of business which was encouraged by the Republic, which was then forgotten by the Empire and led to the nothing planet of the OT. But if we're comparing PT to OT, perhaps we should actually look at Tatooine as it appears in the original 77 film instead of the "sunny blue sky Tatooine" blu-ray. Tatooine originally was intended to be unpleasant in every way, and not just to Luke. I don't think there was any intent to have Tatooine be anything other than a frontier town until George got rose colored glasses for his revisions. It's just that the movie is rather inconsistent in terms of its universe, leading for example to an Imperial officer telling Tarkin that a ship "blasted its way out of Mos Eisley", as if Tarkin would be familiar with a little nothing village on Tatooine of all places. If the movie were more consistent, the officer would probably say that the ship blasted its way off Tatooine.