Star Wars is only problematic from a very narrow set of arbitrary stylistic criteria. People have decided on certain standards of dialogue and acting for movies, and other degrees of realism and originality in character development and are now throwing tantrums because Lucas ignored them. Who pays attention to the dialogue or acting in Opera? Why does no one write off every and all musical film or TV show for the reality-straining convention of breaking into song spontaneously, and even singing a duet with people who are not in hearing range, often in an entirely different building? I mean, WTF? Right? Lucas is a visual filmmaker on a scale no one else approaches, aside from possibly Avatar, whose plot was even more cliched and trope filled without the obvious intention of using archetypes. Darth Vader is an archetype, but the forgettable colonel in Avatar is merely a cliche - two different flavors or unoriginal characterization, but Lucas the Hack created the one who is a gargoyle on the National Cathedral, and I am hard pressed to remember the other guy's name a couple years later, despite my affection for the actor.

Where opera is basically orchestral compositions formatted into drama, Lucas is likewise turning masterpiece visual images into motion pictures. You don't care how well an opera singer acts, because you are there for the music. I don't care how uncharacteristically wooden Natalie Portman and Liam Neeson acted, because the point was the visuals and the feel of Star Wars.

Meanwhile, critical darlings Spielberg and Coppola, for all their technical skill at the photographic arts and direction of films, are basically glorified novel adapters. Except for Spielberg's most entertaining work, which Lucas collaborated on, and according to the transcript of the story conference, provided all the best ideas (as well as discovering the lead actor). While people sneer at Lucas for letting all sorts of crap besmirch his intellectual property (presumably because since he did not come up with his characters [Joseph Campbell did], he could care less how other people portrayed them as long as he could make a buck off it), he had the better sense than Spielberg or Coppola when it came to sticking loved ones in his sequels. You have to work to find George & his kids in Revenge of the Sith, but it is not nearly so easy to ignore Spielberg's wife in Temple of Doom or Coppola's daughter in Godfather III (though Lucas made superior use of the same actress in his prequels).

Hate Lucas if you want for directing The Phantom Menace. But you know what he did NOT direct? Jack. 1941. A.I. Artificial Intelligence. The Terminal. And I defy anyone to tell me that the Star Wars prequels besmirched their franchises worse than Godfather III or Jurassic Park III. Funny how Lucas' third movie in his original trilogy kept up the standards better than the first wholly original film in the trilogies Coppola and Spielberg squeezed out of best-selling novels.