Yes, I know the cgi is bad. Yes, I know it occludes important stuff all the time. Yes, I know the first one suffers from bad jokes for small children.
They aren't perfect, they're good. They have flaws, but despite those flaws, they are effective and beautiful art. They are best understood in context of the original trilogy (this strange storytelling maneuver is known as a ‘pre-quel’) and as movies which tell an overarching story (yes, you have to marathon all three). This is the story of how old, load-bearing instututions are killed or subverted by their own weaknesses, how they grow sclerotic, dogmatic, and blind to the world around them, such that a man of power and vision (an Evil vision) can do with them as he pleases. This is the story of a council of wizard-priests who fuck up in the most basic possible way, who put the cart of ancilliary traditions and preferences before the horse of Tradition - their basic and foundational mission of fighting Evil. It isn't just that their wizard haruspicy is being muddled, but that their common sense is, too.
“Let's refuse to train the messiah basically because of some stupid fucking arbitray rules.”
“Let's give him an asignment wherein he inhabits the lush countryside with a woman who insists on wearing the most esoterically horny outfits put to film, despite the fact that he's meant to be clerically celibate.”
“Let's stake the future of the world on our skill in arms by challenging this evil wizard to a sword duel.”
STATEMENTS DREAMPT UP BY THE UTTERLY DERANGED
Notably, this is not a ‘plot hole’, this is the plot. The point is that a millenia of sitting on their asses has turned the jedi into fools. It's a tradgedy. People fail and bad things happen. That's what makes it dramatic and beautiful and heartwrenching to watch (well, half of it, the rest is John Williams).
How hilarious that it took disney fucking up in such a foundational way (forgetting that movies have to be good art before they can serve your agenda) for lots of people to see this.
(Not Camille Paglia, though, who somehow got it immediately.)
Looks like it's slop forever from this point on, though. The franchise is ‘too big to fail’, by which I mean that its rightsholders expect it to be profitable and, as a rule, will not give any one man the power to use it to fulfil an artistic vision. (Y'know, like what George Lucas did.)