Every opinion should be valid. We don’t have to agree with it. A great many find the PT to be unwatchable trash. I don’t agree, but I’m not going to force them to sit through it. I see the point in wishing those three films had never been made as it changed Star Wars fandom. The old guard sees them as inferior and so does most everyone else.
When I look at a movie, book, or any story, I rate it first and foremost by the quality of the overall story. Quite a few badly made movies have a great story to them. The PT suffer from GL not getting any outside input. For the OT, he was a struggling entrepreneur. For the PT he was at the height of his success. For the OT, he didn’t have the time or energy to do the screenplay or direct TESB or ROTJ so he hired others to take his ideas and flesh them out. For SW/ANH, he had a lot of input from friends, many of whom are highly successful in the movie business. I haven’t heard of any help he had with any of the PT scripts. Nothing. No outside input. That tends to make bad stories. All writers need some outside help. For the PT, GL wrote, cast, directed, produced, and funded the movies all on his own. The results are the mess we see. A great underlying story and great art direction, with iffy dialog and character development (as some have noted, in one scene you can have moments that are great and moments that aren’t). To many this combination ruins the story. Instead of hating them, I decided to figure out what GL was trying to do and see through the less than perfect parts (such as all the gaffs and continuity errors in the OT) to see how the two trilogies fit together to form a larger story.
As I have said, there are many films out there that are worse than the PT. Avatar for one. That movie sucked. I feel about it like many here feel about the PT. But the PT are Star Wars and I had a vested interest in finding the good in them. They are no where near as good as any of the great SF movies, but they don’t completely suck, if only by virtue that they are part of the Star Wars Saga and fill in some important details that I’d been dying to learn for a quarter of a century.
My dislike and ranking of TFA is based on the overall plot and my general dislike of J.J. Abrams and his work (such as the atrocity that is Star Trek Into Darkness). He is a master of writing characters, but he sucks at telling a coherent and complete story. I am so glad someone more competant is doing VIII and IX. Someone who knows story and characters and dialog.