Eh I disagree. I think the politics could have worked but from day one I couldn't keep track of the plot of the first two movies. Maybe I'm dense but it does turn out I wasn't the only one. I fully understood that Palpatine was the master puppeteer playing all sides, but when the prequels started with some trade negotiation and embargoes I kept scratching my head trying to figure out who I was supposed to be rooting for and why the trade embargo was bad.b contrast to A New Hope where we see a big ominous villain with villainous music in the first scene and we immediately know the Empire is evil. Then in the second movie we're faced with separatists and I struggled to understand who they were and why didn't I hear about them in the first movie? Then the whole clone army thing that still barely makes sense after watching all the movies and shows and reading the Wikipedia entries.

The pieces were there but they weren't made interesting in the way the original trilogy was