>>9570594By the end of Phantom Menace, we're one third done with the story, and Anakin & Obi-Wan have no real relationship with each other yet.
10 year time skip between TPM & AOTC means most of the movie has to be spent reintroducing the characters and staging the setting, instead of just jumping into the action.
The mystery over who tampered with the Jedi archives; which is one of the driving forces behind the Obi-Wan side plot is just dropped and never brought up in ROTS.
Because Anakin & Obi-Wan spent all of AOTC either fighting or separated, ROTS has to backtrack to make them the bros they should have been in the past 1 movies, and then have to rush to Anakin's fall.
Padme does nothing and loses the will to live.
Genndy & Filoni's series helps elevate the Clone Wars era to the Original's levels for me personally. Making TPM & ATOC a sort of prologue and pilot to the cartoons, and makes ROTS even more impactful.
Prequel era has a better, more complex story than the Original trilogy, but it wasn't executed nearly as great as the OT without the story expansion packs of the animated series.
