generalfrevious said:

Now I might have said I liked TPM for three years before I realized it sucked; now that I think about it, what I really meant to say was that it took me three years to realize that Padme was Queen Amidala all along.

Otherwise I believe I was in denial about the badness of Episode I for a while; even when I first saw it I found Anakin to be annoying, Jar Jar Binks to be out of place, and the whole film did not feel like Star Wars. What really disappointed me about the PT was that once Qui-Gon died he was almost never mentioned again. I was hoping he would be the Obi-Wan of the new trilogy and that he would come back as a force ghost in Episodes II & III. The good news is that it took me a lot less time to shake off the next two movies.

I'm surprised Lucas didn't do that considering he was trying to "rhyme" certain PT aspects with OT.