Thad, it kills me to see you stand up for these movies. I can understand the likes of Thundercats, because there's some genuine creativity going on there, but
jesusGod help me, I'm gonna have to do the one-thing-at-a-time-rebuttal in order to work through this:
Things that are actually pretty good:
Kashyyyk
We go to Kashyyyk for all of five minutes, wherein we see an awkward battle sequence with rolling wheel robot cars and Wookies armed only with crossbows sitting in ditches firing at armor. At the very least, I don't get why there are water-wheel assault vehicles when you would probably just have a hovering spaceship of some kind at this point in future warfare, and I don't get why the wookies don't have some kind of anti-armor technology or capability. This would be forgivable if the machines and by extension every shot with them in it did not look completely ridiculous - if the battle had looked or felt particularly cool - but it was just weird and aesthetically absurd and impossible to feel anything for when you know only Yoda, who promptly leaves.
As a planet, we've already seen Kashyyyk when it was Endor. I would have preferred any kind of planet or location I had not already seen.
Yoda
I really really wish they had not fucked Yoda up. He would have given some much needed dignity to any scene he was in.
Darth Maul
The fight with Maul was great, but it is absolutely true that you could have swapped out Maul for any other evil character and it would not have changed anything. We knew nothing and end up knowing nothing about him but that he looks and we assume is genuinely evil.
Qui-Gon Jinn
I liked Qui-Gon, he's Obi-Wan's Obi-Wan. I wish they had made him at all unique from the Obi-Wan we see in A New Hope. There was nothing new to see there.
Nearly all the action scenes
The Maul fight was great, the battle with the space depth charges from the Slave I was quite cool, the fight with the Clone Army right afterwards is entertaining if very unfortunately video gamey (compare this with any action sequence from the original triology, and it just lacks visceral feeling or empathetic connection), and some of the Jengo Fett battle was nice.
The Grevious battle was beyond farce. I say that yes, as a man who fucking adored Tartakovsky's take on Grevious, but also just, as a man who can enjoy even the stupidest things if they are entertaining. It was easily the most expensive Stupidest Fucking Thing I have ever seen in a movie (I have seen Transformers 2). The final riding-robots-over-lava clash between Obi-Wan and Anikan was doing okay when they were inside that control room thing in close-quarters fighting, then very very quickly gets very very hard to take seriously as they're dangling from the ladder, slashing at each other over a lava waterfall. I don't think I need to go into the space battle in Episode 1. The Gungan battle was just brutally retarded, obviously. The gladiator battle was tedious and cartoonish and by then I still did not give a quarter-shit about any of the characters involved, or their bug and frogmen antagonists. The space battle at the start of Episode III was a joyless, aimless shitshow with no way to discern the stakes or who was winning or losing or what we were seeing or if we were supposed to care about the deaths of the republic troops (it was never revealed in the movies if the clones were thinking individuals or mindless obedient drones fresh out of the oven). If there were others, I cannot for the life of me remember them.
Darth Vader catches on fire
It did certainly look like a person catching on fire!
So no, again, I don't think the problem is in the ideas, it's in the execution. The story beats are there, the cool visuals are certainly there, it's just that the actual emotional connection with the characters fails on just about every level.
I wanted to like those movies as much as anyone! I just cannot find anything that was developed enough to call an original or satisfying idea.