Honestly, a hybrid fan edit of L8wtr and Hal’s for episode 3 is better than TFA
No way. I’m one of the few who can actually watch and enjoy the prequels. They’ve been with me for much of my life, and I’ve spent a good amount of time trying to find the right fan edits and consider how things could be improved. But seeing TFA makes me want to give that all up and forget the prequels ever even happened. No need for them when we now have something that’s so much better than they could ever be.
And, about the deeper philosophical elements in the PT, they’re almost there, but they’re really not. Even when I was young and considered ROTS one of the best films of all time I still felt like they didn’t really explore the philosophical elements all that much. Interesting things are set up, but they’re not gone into. Good fan edits remove some of the clutter so you can see those interesting things beneath the surface, but they can’t add what’s not there. Matthew Stover’s ROTS adaptation is the only thing that does justice to the story’s potential. It’s entirely possible that scenes were filmed and then cut, but at the end of the day what’s in the movie is in the movie. And it’s not all that well done.