He actually changed my view of them.
I defended them as being pretty good and that though there were too many special effects the general plot was sound. He actually knows what makes a good story work and he's right about how inane some of the choices Lucas made were. Both big and small.
I mean I remember back in the late 80s having those little "debates" I might call them, over Slurpees, about George Lucas making more Star Wars films. Friends would say he's working on them because he already wrote the books. Then I'd explain that he didn't write any books...those were novelizations by other people.
Anyway, the feeling I had in the late 80s was that Lucas was finished with Star Wars and that he was going to move on to other things, and in my 13 year-old mind I figured that even though he created Star Wars, he perhaps wanted to be done with it and movie on to more 'mature' types of movies. I don't mean I thought he should do that, but that it would basically be too good to be true that he wouldn't mind doing more.
Then he did come back and it seemed like he'd lost touch with it all.