No, George had a plan the entire time and even started filming RotS during the filming of AotC. RotS is just a good movie and George Lucas knew what he was doing.
The Prequels were made with each movie building up on each other, showing the slow decline of the Republic as it became the Empire, and why people would support the Empire after years of political deadlock and war.
I've actually thought a lot about this, and I think a lot of it stems from a difference between kids who grew up gaming (real games in 3d that made you feel like you were in a world) and older Gen Xers.
A lot of older star wars fans from the 70s and early 80s seem to only care about the message and story purity of star wars, or the "film quality" and shit. A lot of them liked TFA despite it's soullessness. For those of us born in the late 80s or 90s, we have this obsession with expanded universes. There were some GREAT star wars games in the 2000s and other great EU content that was just as important to us as the movies.
It's telling that the most successful star wars game was battlefront, which is just about having battles with cool guns in interesting locations. George lucas understood this as well, the fight through theed palace is a new unique place for a battle, we had never seen urban combat in a SW movie. Geonosis showed us a full scale WW1 style front, The order 66 montage in ROTS showed us how diverse the types of combat were going on, it's all just stuff begging to be made into a video game or lego sets, the kind of shit you want to see more of. Lucas also goes out of his way to give you a good look at things, everyone knows what the vehicles and "arenas" of his movies are like because he lets the shots breathe and gives them nice clean angles.
Everyone, even haters, remember what the clones, the acklay, the reek, naboo, battle droids, clone gunships, and all this shit looks like and what it was called because it's visually clear and referred to properly, and the things they're involved in are cool and interesting. That's how you make people buy action figures and video games.
There's also the fact that many of these Prequel-hating Gen-X people also dismissed 90% of the Star Wars EU as fanfiction. They might've read a few books they liked, but to them, most of it was bunk. They also dismissed the greater scale and the new things brought by the Prequels with cries of "it's not like the OT, it's all plastic and CGI, it sucks!" You essentially have weaponized ignorance being used to slander George Lucas' Star Wars at a time when it was breaking beyond its original borders of playing "Cowboys and Indians" in outer space with WW2 aesthetics.
You have to realize, these people don't want to see Star Wars as anything but what they remember from the OT. They want the same thing over and over again. These same people who hated the PT and the EU came around to cheer for the Sequels shamelessly copying the OT without any of the substance. They cheered on Lucas selling Star Wars to Disney, they didn't care that the SWEU was demolished to make room for the Sequels and Disney's other projects.
Then they turn around and act as if Andor was the first time Star Wars was made for poli-sci students, while I still remember that time when an Onderonian official and a Republic soldier were debating in a cantina back in KOTOR 2, with them discussing the merits and pros and cons of Onderon staying with the Republic. A lot of the things that these Gen-Xers think is new for Star Wars, Star Wars was already doing it with the SWEU two decades before. These people are really that brain-dead. Between political intrigue, adventures without Jedi or Skywalkers, or even the whole Mando-fanaticism, that shit already existed two decades ago for Star Wars.
These morons literally are behind everything that went wrong for Star Wars. Hence why I blame them more than Disney. Disney's leaders are just corporate whores who suck up to anyone willing to open their wallets, and when Disney destroyed most of the SW universe, the loudest voices in the room were these PT-hating whiners, who had few, if any, dissenting voices to drown them out.
Imagine, if you owned Disney during that time. You just bought Star Wars despite knowing nothing about it, and these whiners were the loudest voices in the room. They hated Lucas and the Prequels, they didn't give two flying fucks about the SWEU, and they want the "old Star Wars" back. What would you have done? Appease them, of course. So you get rid of that SWEU that they don't give a fuck about to make more room for movies that will be just like the OT, to "wash away the stain of Lucas' Prequels" from the franchise. And guess what, these morons loved those moves and cheered Disney on, so what would one expect Disney to do but go forward? And even when Star Wars started to go under, they sure as fuck won't hand it back to the smelly nerds, since they're disgusting in the eyes of the Hollywood elite and the average normie.
And it goes for every single design element in the franchise.
Cool new ships? Nope, just new variations of the old designs.
Cool new aliens? Nope, everything looks like brown potatoes.
Cool new character designs? Nope, bland ugly humans.
They've sucked all fun and creativity out of Star Wars.
Another good example are outfits. Go look at the outfits in the different movies and shows and you can see how similar they are. For example, these are from three different shows:
Similarly, I made a quick comparisons for sith costumes/designs. In Disney era they all just look like Vader rip-offs, while the pre-Disney era had much more variety.
You no longer have nerds making shit for Star Wars. You have "professionals" doing it. These professionals like to copy and paste things to save time, hence the copy-paste outfits for different shows that take place in different eras, as well as every Inquisitor looking like a Darth Vader knockoff, and the ships, aliens, and character designs remaining the same to avoid cost.
Nerds like to ask questions like "wouldn't it be cool if there was a special division of Stormtroopers that hunt rebels and have their own specialized capital ships and TIE Fighters?" (Rebel Strike) "Wouldn't it be cool if the Empire had its own power-armored troops?" (Dark Forces) "Wouldn't it be cool if the Empire created Dark Jedi supersoldiers?" (Jedi Outcast/Academy) "Wouldn't it be cool to have an ancient civilization with a Tower of Babel-style fall, and they had great achievements that merged the Force with technology?" (KOTOR 1) "Wouldn't it be cool if you had a Sith sect that specialized in killing Jedi, and their leader can wipe out a whole planet with the Force?" (KOTOR 2) "Wouldn't it be cool if the Mandalorians were a warrior race that literally worship the very idea of conflict, and they nearly brought the galaxy to heel?" (Mandalorian Wars)
Professionals don't ask those questions. At most, they copy notes from older stuff and add a few things. Like how they took inspiration from the Wannsee Conference in the recent Andor episodes. Or how they made the Children of the Watch be inspired by Orthodox Jews who have a stick up their ass about rules. Hell, just look at Jedi Fallen Order and Jedi Survivor. They bring nothing new to the table, just making a Souls game with lightsabers, yet the best they can come up with is you dueling Vader's thugs for a holocron that you end up destroying, or your side getting fucked by an ISB plant.
Meanwhile, back then, you blew up the Empire's Space Marine program with the Dark Troopers, (Dark Forces) or you executed Order 66 and wiped out the Jedi, (Battlefront 2/ROTS game) or you threw Vader in your locker room after kicking the shit out of him and his Dark Jedi goons. You might've even introduced the Emperor's face to the floor in that battle in the Death Star. (Force Unleashed 1 and 2)
You basically traded the extraordinary for the mundane, and you even see it in the new shows emphasizing the mundane over the extraordinary. Andor is about the day-to-day dealings of the Rebels. The new shows coming out will deal with the day-to-day dealings of figures such as Ventress, Cad Bane, and Maul. They're officially distancing themselves from the grand adventures of the Skywalkers that shape the galaxy, and they're going more along the lines of the average pleb. It's almost like the Jedi and the Skywalkers are a dirty word for them.
I'd rather have rapes in my Star Warz than the pathetic pussy shit that was in the tard fest that was Rebels.
One thing that struck me about the Empire in both Andor and Rebels is that you're not allowed to see them as cool. Either they're a complete fucking joke aside from Vader and Thrawn, or they're the banal kind of evil who plan mass-murder while passing around cakes and wine. I mean, I was expecting at least a battle scene of the Empire crushing the shit out of the Rebels and showing why they're the big swinging dicks of the galaxy, but no. Such examples are rare, like that one scene in Rebels where three TIE Interceptors crush a small Rebel convoy, or that other scene with Hera's fighters getting shot down by regular TIEs. Or that one riot in Ferrix at the ass end of Andor Season 1. And maybe if you squint, the bombing of Mandalore in the Book of Boba Fett might count.
I suppose given Star Wars' new owners, they can't allow you to see the Empire as cool, meanwhile, there's no shortage media from the Empire side that made them look cool; like the campaigns where you play as the Empire in Rebellion or Empire at War, or in novels where Vader takes on more than one Jedi and comes out on top, like he's the Empire's version of 2003 Grievous. Hell, even in games where you do fight them, they look cool, like how X-Wing has a scene of them conquering an entire planet with ease, or Dark Forces showing them dropping Dark Troopers onto a planet and easily rolling them over. Hell, more than one of the SWTOR trailers has the Sith Empire coming out on top, and looking cool while doing it.
I just miss the days when both sides are allowed to look cool, and even though they took inspiration from real-world factions, they could still be their own thing. You don't need to be a Confederate sympathizer in real life to like the Confederacy of Independent Systems, nor do you need to be a Nazi-lover or an enthusiast for the old British Empire to like the Galactic Empire. Now? Openly profess that you love the Empire, and people will think you're a fascist. I miss the days when mainstream society didn't give a shit about this stuff, and we nerds were allowed to say who we like without being called a Nazi or something.
at least the character in the EU was named Lieda
