I was let down by two of these movies, Phantom Menace and Crystal Skull. At the end, I just felt like I didn't care that much about what I just saw. The stories, on a fundamental, structural level, were shoddy in their construction. You could see the seams in them. Each one had genuinely, cheesy forced moments of emotion, because the stories didn't earn those moments. Both of them had good chase scenes, but there was almost nothing going for them when the action slowed down and the characters started talking. And at times, the plots of both hit absolute dead ends that they had to cheat their way out of, which was inexcusable. Ultimately, the tie breaker for the better film goes to Skull, because Irina and Mutt were better than Maul the Mute and Jar Jar the Duck.
I absolutely feel that Lucas course corrected successfully with Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. Those are both movies where I got into the story and cared about what happened. The drama of the stories worked. They kept the pace up and didn't have too many slow or bland moments. And they didn't force feed "feel good" moments down the audience's throat. They also had darker, scarier and grittier action than the more family-friendly TPM and Skull. They had spectacular action and effects, which felt more justified by the story than in Phantom Menace in particular. And they feel more focused and purposeful than TPM and Skull, which feel more like random grab bags of moments loosely assembled into movies.