The prequels sucked big time. It's going down as the most highly budgeted dissapointing lame-@$$ triliogy in history. Don't get your hopes up for EPIII to be any better than the last two, you're setting yourself for a 3rd dissapointment.
GL can make story plots, that's it..he is worst in everything else. You know why the OT was better? It's because GL was working with people who knows their craft and loves what they do. These people also knows how to contradict GL if they don't think his idea is that great.
Did you know that GL's first idea for the Millennium Falcon was that it looked like an elongated hotdog bun with four stands? And when the actual MF was constructed he wanted it to fly vertically? Good thing the ones designing the MF had better ideas.
GL just got to cocky about his film and totally ignored everybody elses inputs.
The prequels had a lot of mistakes in them. Like in ESTB: "Go to the Dagobah system. Look for Yoda; the Jedi Master who instructed me". But we see in EPI, Obi-Wan was trained by Qui-Gon!
His interest in Digital filming just went too far. Everything else came in second.
Yoda ALSO instructed OB1... he instructs ALL the kids. Watch AOTC and you'd know. Wouldn't make much sense to send Luke to another teacher of OB1's if he's dead. He wasn't wrong, he just gave all the info that was useful for Luke.
I wouldn't put it as strongly as you, but I agree with you that it seems George makes all he decisions himself without being contradicted too much. Perhaps all the limitations in technology during the maing of the OT forced him and his team to make up with better storytelling. I dunno.
I agree with Dejio. Lucas has just about had it. EpI was awful, and EpII, despite a slight improvement, was still disappointing. It just lacks in every department, the cast seem to resemble cardboard props with speech bubbles, in a word - wooden. I hope EpIII is better, but it would have to do some major improving to match up to the original trilogy.