generalfrevious said:

I'd say we could trace it all the way back to the opening crawl of TPM:

...the taxation of interstellar trade routes...

Kidding aside (and you may not be), that's a very good indicator of how out of touch Lucas was with what had connected the audience to the original film.

We went from this;

Pursued by the Empire's sinister agents,
Princess Leia races home aboard her
starship, custodian of the stolen plans
that can save her people and restore
freedom to the galaxy....

To this;

Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic.
The taxation of trade routes to outlying
star systems is in dispute.
Hoping to resolve the matter with a blockade...

To me, after having read a myriad of interviews with Lucas and the people involved with the original film, it seems as though he never really understood why the first film was such a phenomenon. Looking at the crawls, it seems he still didn't understand it twenty-two years later.

We started with a princess trying to save the galaxy in her starship to a dispute over republic taxation? Yeah, that's an adventure.

I don't remember details from Phantom, but I can tell you I knew fairly quickly that it wasn't the droid I was looking for. I was just watching it go by on the screen. It looked like a movie inspired by Star Wars, not a movie connected to it.