I'm going to go out on a limb and somewhat defend Lucas here.
Now, don't take that to mean I'm defending episodes 1-3. Not even a little. They're terrible in ways that cannot be enumerated in mere hours of explanation. But I kind of understand what happened with Lucas. And it sort of depresses me and makes me feel sorry for him.
Every single one of us got to see Star Wars. We went to a theater or popped in a VHS or DVD and watched Star Wars. We saw a kickass ship with some bigass engines fly across the screen, and then a GIANT SPACE WEDGE FILL THE WHOLE THING! We got to hear the breathing before we saw Vader. We got to see the laser sword ignite for the first time. We got to see the bad guys blow up a whole damned planet! We got to hear "I don't care what you smell, get in there you big hairy oaf" and not take it for a sex joke. We got to see Han come back at the last second, and Luke use the Force to blow up the impossible weapon.
Lucas never got to see that. I mean, sure, he's watched the movies, but when he watched the movies, he was seeing that damn shot that took us 4 days to block, and at the last minute, the Falcon model wouldn't stay on it's wire. He saw hours of going over each frame of the light saber with what amounts to a magic marker. He was watching the end result of an almost literal fist fight over the edit of the movie with the studio (the edit we saw wasn't the one he wanted to show us....)
He may be the only person on the planet who never got to see Star Wars as a fan. And because of that, he doesn't get why we love it so much. I truly think the person who understands the magic of Star Wars the least is the dude who gave it to us in the first place.
Kinda makes you glad he's gonna get to see a movie that he had nothing to do with, huh?