DuracellEnergizer said:

I watched the OOT years before I ever see the SE, but for some reason or another -- probably childhood naivete combined with hero worship of Lucas, the creator (so I thought) of Star Wars -- I bought into the whole "the SE is better than the OOT because these are the films as they were always meant to be" schtick and came to see the OOT as a hopelessly underdone prototype.

Thank God the shock of how bad the PT was combined with a more mature post-adolescent mind roused me from that delusion, though.

My experience was very similar to this.

While I never thought of the OOT as bad—I'd seen it far too many times as a kid to ever dislike it even a little—I did buy into the hype of the SE's as being better, and for several years only ever watched them instead. I even tried to like the prequels when they came out, not quite knowing why something always felt a bit off. It wasn't until the horror of the 2004 DVD's that I realized something was seriously wrong in SW-land (as a sound guy, it was the terrible audio remix that ultimately ruined it for me), causing me to go back and revisit the OOT for the first time since 1996.

Seeing them again was like meeing old friends I used to be really close with, but had later abandoned to fit in with the popular crowd. Fortunately, we were able to reconnect immediately: they looked the way I remembered, they sounded the way I remembered, everything was just as it had been when I'd fallen in love with them in the first place. The shock of this caused me to go back and question everything I'd taken for granted, and with a more mature mindset I came to perceive clearly what quality movie-making is really about.