The thing abut the prequels is that people concentrate on the bad stuff in them, and there is a LOT of bad stuff because of poor directing, horrible scripts and some miss-managed use of CGI. There is a solid plot running through them (Palpatine creating a war and then running it from both sides? Genius.), awesome scenes and even some of the memes are great. Plus the clone wars ties the second and third film together perfectly and 'fixes' some of the main characters (Anakin in particular, he is by far the worst scripted character in the prequels). Also without the prequels we wouldn't have Ahsoka.
Not going to go into the Disney Trilogy too much, but reading the leaks about what might happen in the third film fills me with dread of what is about to come.