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I'm an Old School Star Wars fan (I saw A New Hope in theaters when it was just a little SF flick starting to get buzz).
I think you're forgetting just how much fans loathed the prequels when they first came out. Well, loathed is a strong term. They still went to see them. Fans had been waiting for 16 years after Return of the Jedi, the hype was overwhelming, and while A Phantom Menace was of course a box office success, hardcore SW fans were trashing it and the rest of the prequels almost immediately. Today maybe the backlash against Jar Jar Binks and Jake Lloyd's acting seems overdone, but at the time those prequels felt like a huge let-down, as pretty as they were. The plot went in weird directions, the characters weren't what people were expecting, and of course over a decade of EU content and fan speculation got blown away. The prequels were really... not good, and the consensus was that George Lucas was a good visual director but hugely overrated as a writer.
Of course, then the sequels came out and made the prequels look like golden age SF by comparison.
I'm old enough to remember watching the prequels in first run in cinemas, and the hatedom for the prequels at the time was worse than the hatedom the sequels got. The prequels are less hated now because of the passage of time. It doesn't help that the prequels recovered from a truly atrocious start (The Phantom Menace remains in my view comfortably the worst of the nine) meaning that Revenge of the Sith not sucking was something people ignored at the time, whereas the sequels got worse and worse (The Farce Awakens is a perfectly OK remake of A New Hope).
It was wall to wall, while the Sequel Hate became polarized like everything else today. It became another pseudo-political thing where the sides also got associated with tribes.
Ironically, I think this is why everyone feels the sequels discourse is more toxic (putting aside recency bias).
The prequels got wall to wall hate so there was really no point in arguing. If you liked it, you put up with it or ignored it. And if you were a kid you likely didn't give a shit. Sure boomer, the lightsaber fights are too twirly. The hate was also pointed at cast and crew who were either totemic enough to be able to not care (Lucas) or it was awful for (Lloyd) but it wasn't as bad for fans.
The sequels hate is much more evenly split (especially since even pro-Sequels fans may hate one of Abrams or Johnson) and no one can really triumph. It's turned into a bunch of warring tribes who turn their fire on each other constantly. It felt like there was actually something to play for so it became even more bitter. You add in the culture war stuff with "the Force is Female" pivot and the reactionary counter-attack and LucasFilm's possibly well-meaning attempts to correct for past abuse by coming out strongly against chuds in a way that seemed pretty self-serving (it happened when their shitty shows were getting bad reviews) and it became just like any other culture war topic with the same heat and long-term bitterness.
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I'm not forgetting that at all. But I think your argument is missing that there was not only the group of fans who loathed the prequels. There were also fans who enjoyed them quite a bit. I remember going to see Phantom Menace as a teenager with my friends, and we all came out of that movie stoked about how cool it was to see the Old Republic and the Jedi order at its peak, things we had only imagined before. I fully acknowledge that there were fans who very vocally and bitterly hated the prequels, but they were not even close to unanimous among the fan base.
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I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the prequels were (mostly) fine as movies, particularly The Phantom Menace. They weren't fine as Star Wars movies.
I think my take is best summed up by the midichlorian scene. In a different setting, this is a fine scene! Sure, you can measure the space magic capabilities of someone with a blood test. That's fine! If it was in Star Trek, sure, or if it was measuring for bionic strength in Mass Effect, for instance. It is, however, completely wrong for Star Wars and The Force.
Exactly. Star Trek is (or was) hard(ish) science, the technobabble was at least a pretence at 'based on current understanding of scientific principles'. Star Wars is space fantasy, so blood tests for midichlorians sits very uneasily alongside 'I got spontaneously pregnant without having sex'. Going back to the original movies, the Force and the Jedi etc. are regarded as 'hokey ancient religions' and mysticism, not Based On True Science.
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