I've been thinking that the real problem with Star Wars (both Prequel and High Estrogen) and the Ghostbusters Reboot is that they're expecting to tell complete story over three movies. Beginning in one, middle in two, and end in three. So each series delivers two movies with neither a satisfying climax nor a proper cliffhanger.
By contrast Ep4: A New Hope had a real ending. So did Ghostbusters (OG).
If I remember correctly, Lucas made sure A New Hope could stand alone if it flopped but he had plans for there to be 9 movies all along. After he made the prequel trilogy and saw that fans didn't like them as much so he scrapped the final trilogy, thus Disney got to write their own once they had the franchise. One of the only remaining Lucasfilms bigwigs who knows of the original Lucas vision is Dave Filoni which is why the animated stuff has been better than the films since Disney took over. Filoni should be the one running all the Star Wars stuff not Kathleen Kennedy.