Jonathan Bernstein has a theory about the Star Wars prequels:

I don’t really know if this has all been said before, but wouldn’t expanding Bail Organa into a real character have really improved things a lot (presumably at the expense of about 90% of Episode I, which just gets worse every time I think about it). There’s so much that could have been done through him…of course, there’s the need that I have seen many remark on for a non-Jedi action guy — indeed, he and Padme could have had some adventure together (could have have been romantically interested in Padme? Tragically, with him realizing the age gap makes it impossible? Or could he have some other serious tie to her, making the adoption more meaningful)? I know he’s lurking around for a while, but that he sort of suddenly shows up during the crisis as the only guy that Yoda can trust seems pretty weak, doesn’t it? But it didn’t have to be; imagine, for example, if we see that he gets away with it because the Emperor is blind to the possibility that ordinary people could matter, not just Jedi.

I think that these are interesting ideas, and to the extent that more Jimmy Smits time would have improved the films because Smits is a far better actor than any of the actual stars of the film, how could it not have made them better? Spending more time with him would have meant taking it away from someone else, which could only have been a plus in terms of quality. But the problem with Revenge of the Sith is also the major, basic conceptual flaw of the prequels, which is that appreciation of them hinges on Anakin Skywalker being a tragic hero when really he’s neither. The biggest misstep as I see it is that the concept of going from kid Anakin to teenage Anakin to adult Anakin, because kid Anakin is a completely different character from later Anakin, and the need to make teenage Anakin sullen, selfish and melancholy–while entirely age appropriate–means that there’s never really a high place of virtue for him to fall from, nor really much of an opportunity to be heroic. And a few battle scenes showing his valor in combat just aren’t enough to establish that, considering he’s sidelined for even some of those. Anakin diplays zero heroism outside of combat. He’s just not a believable hero at any point, no matter how many times the script insists he is. His fall more resembles, say, the soft and gradual decline of Tony Soprano more than the shocking descent of Michael Corleone, which is a wee bit of a problem since Michael is a tragic hero, and Tony is an antihero. The prequels really should have started with Anakin in his early 20s as an up-and-coming Jedi assigned to Obi-Wan, who used himself to be talked about as a possible golden boy himself, as the two have to work together to keep the old Republic from falling apart. There’s the basis there for both friendship and rivalry, tensions between power and duty, and it sidesteps some of the limitations of Lucas’s ideas. When you think about it, almost everything Anakin did in the first two movie can be written off with, “Hey, he was just growing up!” Which tends to minimize the epic nature of this alleged tragedy, if your natural reaction is to dismiss what the characters do after watching them. Sith winds up having to do most of the heavy lifting of this “tragedy”, and its comparatively high regard probably has a lot to do with the fact that the characters actually do stuff and there are actual themes being explored, as well as that it seems as though the thought put into that story was higher than the usual amount: none. But it’s still a deeply-flawed film.

I will give Lucas this. While there’s not much excuse for Episode I, where the disparity between how vivid, coherent and exciting the action sequences are versus how dull, nonsensical and vague the story is suggests that they spent all their time on the former, I do think that the other prequels exhibited some ambition. Lucas’s characters in the original films are all spins on various classic archetypes (the wise old wizard, the naive farmboy with dreams, etc.), but in the prequels that isn’t the case. Lucas actually seems to be trying to create characters in those films who aren’t variations on stock types. And the fixation on politics suggests an attempt to make some political commentary and to use more sophisticated ways of generating drama in his stories. I think he completely fails at all of this due to his own limitations as an artist, and a huge backlash was going to be inevitable after all that since there’s little America has less sympathy for than a middlebrow entertainer trying to be something more, and not quite pulling it off. But I do think that the “biting off more than he could chew” theory explains a lot of why those movies stunk. The last two prequels seem to me to be failed art films, while the rest of the series are entertainments to varying degrees of success. Ultimately, though, writing a tragedy of the scope Lucas was aiming for with Anakin/Vader is a very tough task even for a strong writer, which Lucas isn’t, and he didn’t help himself by how he approached the story.