Additional thoughts:

* I definitely agree that “child Anakin” was a mistake, as was “child Boba Fett”. Patton Oswalt called this one: what was with Lucas’ obsession with child versions of our favorite villains. I’m surprised we didn’t get a scene with a young Tarkin hazing the plebes at the academy.

* Could we for-crying-out-loud move the story forward in the second movie?

* Any characterization of Yoda that was developed in Empire was completely chucked out the window in the prequels. For instance, I got the impression that his tortured grammar in Empire was mostly an act to put Luke off his guard; he rarely seemed to use it after he revealed his true identity. The prequel version of Yoda seemed almost a parody of the original character.

* More generally, randomly including iconic characters and settings from the original films (“Hey, kids, it’s Chewbacca! You like Chewbacca, don’t you?”) makes the Star Wars universe seem small.

* Finally, the Old Republic setting just seemed less “epic” than I imagined it. When you watch the first movie, you get the idea that the Old Republic was a far-off, semi-mythical golden age. Jedi like Obi-Wan (himself impossibly old) have been carrying on the fight underground for generations until Vader (“a pupil of mine”) betrayed them, and now they are all but extinct. Then, along comes the prequel trilogy, and you find out that it was all only 20 years ago. Han Solo is probably old enough to remember the Old Republic, and Obi-Wan is only about 50, though the years have apparently not been kind to him (did he spend the whole time strung out on meth or something?) It’s ok, I guess, but it’s not what I (and apparently a lot of other people) imagined.

And that, I think, is why Gen-Xers (at least those of the nerd subspecies) hate the prequels so much: they’re just not as cool as what we imagined ourselves. I don’t know about you, but I had an image in my head of what the heyday of the Jedi was like, and it didn’t include cutesey kids accidentally destroying droid battleships, sappy romances, or being offered black-market smokes in seedy joints within sight of the Jedi Temple (!?). The prequels don’t measure up to what we imagined, and I think that makes them all the more disappointing because it means the films we hoped for will now never be made.