I'm fonder of the prequels than most people seem to be. I think there's a lot of bandwagon-jumping with thse films - it's fashionable to hate them, so people condemn them for (say) being absolutely lacking in depth and complexity without stopping to check whether or not they actually are. People also want to enjoy them as much as they remember enjoying the original trilogy - but this can't happen, partly because the original trilogy was (from a technical perspective) simply years ahead of any other film that had been previously made (Lucas and ILM basically invented the motion-contorl camera), and partly because nostalgia makes everything seem very rose-tinted.
The new films are not exactly Shakespeare, it's true, but they don't try to be; they are primarily visual experiences, stories told in images rather than words. AOTC is quite stunning from a visual perspective: almost every shot looks like it belongs in a futuristic art gallery, beautiful composition, colours, use of light.... Check out the chase over Coruscant, for instance (the sequence that begins with Obi Wan hanging from the assassin droid, and ends with the sequence in the bar). Notice how the chase goes through several quite distinct sectors of the city - residential, industrial, financial, etc. Then notice how every single indoor shot in the film where the room has a window allows you to see something strange out of that window - no opportunity is ever wasted to flesh out the visual world. An awful lot of effort went into that.