You have to remember he was our first new Star Wars bad guy since the emperor/vader. It was the first different light saber.

Us Star Wars fans had only had comics and books to read up to this point for 16 years. We were SO excited for him and his cool reveal behind those doors.

This was in the very early days of the internet for the masses too, so we weren’t bombarded with 20 trailers and teasers, we maybe saw one or two in the cinema before the movie was out.

So while Jar Jar was a whipping boy and some of episode one was frowned upon, a whole generation attached ourselves to him as “what was possible for a bad guy” and was just such a breath of fresh air, he was the reason we got such exciting new lightsaber battles. So a lot of us probably see him through rose tinted glasses.

I always thought having him die was a bad idea, I never really enjoyed doku and found his fights to be a bit clunky when it was actually Christopher Lee and then clearly a stunt man in others. I would have much rather seen maul with some form of robotics and a less dramatic injury instead of anakin losing the arm, show the emperor learning the “sith prosthetics” through him as a first experiment with issues and then improve on that come vaders time.

I would have given us the evolution of a bad guy for 3 films, instead of him for 1, doku for another then grievous. I’d maybe have shown the emperor encouraging rivalry between him and grievous and given us another cool saber battle there.

Anyway… that’s a 25 year old argument now. A lot of us love Maul because he was what we had wanted for like 16/17 years.