Well, my story only answers some peripherally-related questions:
I realized that the world in general might think the prequels sucked before TPM even opened. There was a popular theatre in town that opted not to show TPM when the whole world was still getting hyped for it. When asked by a local reporter, they said they always had to consider if a movie "had legs" or not based on a preview screening, and TPM, in their opinion, did not have legs. My reaction to the story was that I thought the only way for a new Star Wars movie to have no legs would be if it were two hours of Lucas vomiting on the camera. Anything better than that, even if only slightly better, would make money. Turns out I was right, but not the way I'd hoped.
The first time I admitted the prequels sucked was to my German professor. We were doing a "conversational German" evaluation, so we pretty much talked about whatever we wanted to. He asked me what I did that weekend, and I told him about going to see TPM, with all those people dressed in costumes and lining up around the block, etc. He then asked if the movie was good, and... I kinda got defensive. I said "Well, no, it's not good, but it was a big party--like Woodstock for our generation. If you asked someone who went to Woodstock if the music was any good, you've missed the point." But it turned out I was actually wrong on this count--whether the movie was good or not did in fact matter. I was still very much in denial about the direction Star Wars was taking--I thought the Special Editions were interesting alternate might-have-been versions, but if someone told me Lucas actually intended to erase the classic films from history and replace them with these CGI experiments, I'd have said they were crazy.
The first time I realized the entire modern Star Wars franchise sucked was after seeing AOTC. It showed TPM was no fluke, and meanwhile the aforementioned crazy talk about the Special Editions was turning out to be true. There was literally nothing left in the Star Wars universe that didn't suck--the good stuff had been removed, everything left was crap, and the only prospects were for more crap. This was about the time of my long, dark winter of Star Wars, where I pretty much gave up and let it die.
I went to see ROTS on a lark, with the guy I saw terrible movies with, often with free tickets he could get. I saw Alien vs Predator and Signs with him, so this could hardly be worse, right? And besides, this one was getting lukewarm reviews for a change. Oh. My. God. I thought AOTC was as bad as the prequels could possibly get, but I was so, so wrong. We didn't talk about it, we didn't laugh about it, we just left. If the tickets weren't free I would have asked for my money back.
At this point Star Wars films were sharing company with Battlefield Earth in my pantheon of films never to watch again under any circumstances, no matter how drunk.
But then I had a kid, and later another, and sought out the versions I actually did remember loving so many years earlier, and found this place. It turns out Star Wars actually is great... if you can find it.