Palpatine uses the bureaucracy to it's own downfall.
That kind of thing probably works much better in novels that it does in movies and on TV, where you need motivations that are simpler, easier to dramatize, more emotion-based and visual, especially visual. Nobody can visualize taxation and trade routes in any meaningful way, and they mean different things to different people (the emotional reactions are too complex and unpredictable, so you have to ratchet it down to the level of cliche - everyone can agree "bureaucracy is bad" if the bureaucrats are cliches).
If the war had been about Separatist worlds that wanted to clone people as slaves, and the Republic objected, you'd have a highly visual source of the conflict: the clones and the factories can be shown; the badness of the situation can be dramatized (you can identify with clones who are being oppressed and see them being oppressed); the situation is highly emotional and everyone's emotions can be predicted to flow the same way (sympathy for clones) without anything needing to be simplified to the level of cliche.
The prequels are much more thought through than many would want to admit. In fact you will not understand them by watching them once, there are still little bits and pieces coming into place for me, when I rewatch the whole saga annually (and I watched every film at least 50 times).
That will never happen in my case because now that I've seen Anakin being performed the right way, I never want to subject myself to the wrong way, ever again.
I've watched the first two once and the last one twice, and that will be my lifetime total. Whatever needs to happen in the story, it's up to TCW to deliver.
Padme displays a certain ruthlessness by using Ahsoka's Jedi contacts for her own purposes.
I'd say she was more than justified.
Somebody has got to start taking charge.
My thought about the Seperatists is that many of them had legitimate reasons for leaving the corrupt government.
I never got that idea until this most recent episode, but it's a very good addition to the story because it solves a big problem I had with the PT that the Jedi and the Republic look stupid for being fooled so long by Palps.
From the PT, I had the impression that the war was cartoonishly evil Trade Federation goons + Palps + droids. Palps and his greedy cohorts manufactured a war out of the clear blue sky. At least some intelligent people should be able to realize "there isn't any legitimate reason to fight" and start getting suspicious immediately.
But if the war is largely due to pre-existing fault lines in the Republic, and Palps & the goons just make a little push here and a little pull there to get the war going, then intelligent people might not think anything was being manipulated because they can see why the war would start naturally. That seems to be Padme's belief, since she doesn't regard her Separatist friend as some kind of lunatic, or someone hiding ignoble motives, but rather a reasonable person with reasonable ideas who can be negotiated with, and is making the assumption that enough Separatists are like that, to make negotiation with their Senate worthwhile.
This is just another example of how the PT devoted too much time to extraneous stuff and ignored vital stuff. The story needed a lot more set-up that the war wasn't really contrived at all - maybe with a major character who becomes a Separatist to dramatize what the issues might be. And more attention devoted to the problems in the Republic - the movies didn't address this sufficiently or at all that I can recall.
Of course this all takes the risk of being a big, boring civics lesson, which is why I'd prefer to toss all of it out, make the war something simple that doesn't need to be explained much at all (clone slaves) and devote more effort to the bigger, metaphysical story about the Force and what it all means.
But if they insist on going the civics lesson route, then I'm game. At least in a TV series, there's no problem with having a lack of screentime for exploring complex issues and I gotta give them credit at least for not just making this all a brainless hack & slash saga with no ambition to be anything more.
No the Republic fell because its citizens no longer cared.
I've also wondered about that (just like I've wondered if the Seppys had any legitimate grievances), but once again, I haven't seen that idea dramatized convincingly either. The "degenerate Republic" angle would give the story more of a tragic dimension, since the Senate and Jedi alike would be fighting to defend something that cannot be rescued. If people don't care, you don't have a democracy, and they deserve to have an empire inflicted on them.
The impact of that angle on the story is that Padme and the Jedi can still be considered intelligent, but tragic. They should at some level realize their fight is doomed to failure. Anakin doesn't need to be portrayed as an adrenaline junkie who doesn't really care about politics, but rather can be a smart guy who sees which way the wind is blowing, isn't bothered by the idea of a Republic filled with with morons who are going to get exactly what they deserve, and jumps over to the winning team because he's not the type to go down with the ship, like the rest of the Jedi.
So those are really two very different ways of taking the story: the imperfect but salvageable Republic which is being legitimately challenged by the Separatists, and falls only because the bad guys were clever and the good guys didn't get their act together in time; and an unsalvageable Republic that is being abandoned by the smarter people among them, while the idealists who hang in there are destroyed.
And both of those are very different (and much better) than the impression left by the PT: a galaxy-full of morons who can't see that one guy is manipulating everyone into disaster.
