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AMC - Blogs - SciFi Scanner - John Scalzi's Guide to the Most Epic FAILs in Star Wars DesignSome bad design and flat-out illogical decisions can be forgive, if the story is good and especially if the good story does not depend on the bad design to hold it up.
But take a bad story, and the bad designs and decisions are too distracting and cannot be tolerated. And "suspension of disbelief" is virtually impossible when it is built on a foundation of impossible illogic.
In this case, the original Star Wars stories could slip by in most cases, because it really was fantasy and not science fiction. But mainly because of basically good stories and good characters.
In the later prequels, not so much. All the problems including both original and new bad designs and decisions were too much to be supported by the poor stories and weak characters (and caricatures).