Few of the "young guard" have actually seen a single actual Star Wars movie. They've only seen the PT and the SE's, and if they have an opinion on those, yippee for them I guess, but it doesn't actually reflect on the Star Wars trilogy.

The only tragedy is that, for the few who actually do finally see Star Wars, they can't help but see it as just an altered form of Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope: Special Edition: 2011 Edition. Since the latter is a fairly mediocre film at best, it's hard for them not to feel that the whole story, even if told in a different, considerably better film, is still mediocre.

So again, those "young guards" who saw the SE's first had their well poisoned, and I actually understand how they came to not like the OT very much. By the time they saw Star Wars (if they ever saw it), it wasn't the underpinning of the whole Star Wars universe, it was merely an interesting alternate version of a ho-hum film and historical artifact.

That said, even the SE trilogy is better then the PT in my opinion (with the exception of Jedi: SE, which flat-out blows), but since they're both disastrous in so many ways, I'm not sure it's really surprising that there's some difference of opinion.