I think the PT and ROTJ have the potential to be as good as ESB but that potential is squandered by the lack of grounding in the fantasy. The rebels in the first two films feel like real people. The threat of the Imperials feels tangible. Adding puppets and later CGI to the pro and antagonists makes both sides feel less realistic. The aliens are either depicted as plausible replacements for real world archetypes (the Tuskens represent the resistance of first peoples against colonists for example) or a background characters in the first two films. The exceptions (Chewie and Yoda) paved the way for aliens beings taking more of the centre stage but the technology used to depict them is less and less phyical and the effect is that they become increasingly divorced from physical reality.
The Sandpeople are depicted as physical beings with interesting details in their costumes that speak of a culture beyond what is said.
The Ewoks and Gungans could have filled a similar role but they look increasingly less physical and are played for laughs. Even the Jawas have a sinister edge to them and yet I felt genuinely sad for them when were slaughtered by Storm Troopers. One feels the beginning of that with the Ewoks but none of that at all with Gungans. Similarly the droids are physical in the first two films and treated as abused characters which we are supposed to care for. In ROTJ they become more puppetised and the subject of very strange jokes (the droid torture scene is really out of place compared to the torture scenes in ANH and ESB). They then become comic animated characters in the PT the battle droids lacking any menace and lacking any sense of sympathy.
Jedi is where the rot set in. The PT is just rotten.
LuckyGungan, this explains the TWO OUT OF SEVEN signature. If the PT were never made, things would have been a lot more tolerable, becuase Jedi is just a natural extenstion of creators being exhausted with a franchise. It’s not bad at all and in hindsight is much more forgivable. But then we got three anti-films from Lucas himself, and the once sacred franchise was thrown out of orbit forever, only to be possibly thrown off course yet agin by the corporate suits at Disney.