That’s because Lucas is not really a proficient writer or director. He’s a great high-level ideas and world-building man, but when it gets into the nitty-gritty of putting that world-building and those ideas down into coherent plot and dialogue, he stumbles.
ITA. Interestingly, the Cartoon Network “Clone Wars” cartoon series, started out rather sappy and trite, with Anakin and his colleagues usually “winning” at the end of each episode, but eventually became much darker and more complex, and actually managed to add a lot of depth to the prequel era characters, even Darth Maul, though his return from the dead was pretty far-fetched. Certainly, they show how the Jedi Order, as well as the Senate, is revealed to have had a lot of internal problems and corruption, that helped bring about its eventual fall, even apart from Palpatine’s scheming.
The Anakin-Padme romance is made more realistic, such as introducing a former “close friend” of Padme and how Anakin reacts to him, for example. Although it’s never really clarified if Padme was actually in a romantic relationship with the guy, or they were just close friends and he had a crush on her, he does profess to love her. And it does make sense that Padme did have at least one romantic involvement before Anakin.
The show-only character, Asajj Ventress, goes from a one-note minion of Count Dooku, to a much greyer, interesting character over the course of the series.
And AFAIK, they managed to do this without outright contradicting the narrative of the movie, especially in how they explain why Ahsoka Tano, introduced as Anakin’s Padawan, is nowhere to be found in the Revenge of the Sith movie.
So yes, Lucas is a great world-builder, even though he’s not that great at writing realistic dialogue and romance.
I said the same thing about Rocky V.
