Rick Worley describes the smug stupidity of this line of thought:
LINK
The guy who makes hour-long videos about mutilating women in his basement and humping cats is also a major proponent of this crank theory, as is RocketJump, a dishonest movie "expert" who runs a fake film school on YouTube: a movie buff's version of PragerU. The fake film school's thesis is that Star Wars was an unwatchable mess before Richard Chew, Paul Hirsch and Marcia Lucas turned George Lucas' lemon into lemonade*. The Red Letter Moron made a similar assertion by posting a few seconds of the reaction to a rough cut of The Phantom Menace, and using the deductive reasoning one normally only hears from anti-vaccine crackpots, surmised that the movie was awful. It's tempting to bring up Martin Scorsese's quote that rough cuts make him sick to his stomach, but pointing out the obvious to those who despise George Lucas is like mentioning iambic pentameter to a troop of baboons.It’s been a popular notion for some time now that Star Wars needed to be saved from George
Lucas. It took me a long time to work out how people could seriously think something so
nonsensical.
There is no Star Wars without George Lucas. Where do these people think that Star Wars came
from?
To get around the conundrum of loving Star Wars but hating George Lucas, fans have created
entire alternate realities. The Secret History of Star Wars is a book-length attempt by fan/possible
mental patient Michael Kaminski to give credit for everything good about the original three films
to somebody, anybody, besides George Lucas. It was Ralph McQuarrie, Gary Kurtz, it was
Lawrence Kasdan, Irvin Kersher, Marcia Lucas, it was maybe the craft service guy, but it was
most definitely not the guy who wrote, directed, and originated the entire thing. Kaminski makes
baroque conspiracy theories about how Lucas has lied about the development of all of the films,
based on the fact that Kaminski has “uncovered” that the story did in fact evolve over the
different script drafts and didn’t originate fully formed in the version that Lucas has chosen to
finally present. The way that fans are able to twist reality to fit their preferred version of events is
displayed in fact that he presents these revelations as “secret” when he has no special access of
any kind and all of his research is based on information readily made available by Lucas and
Lucasfilm themselves
* This implies that Star Wars movies are the only ones that get edited, when in fact every motion picture ever made has been edited.
Well it now appears that YouTube isn't just the lair of Lucas-bashing halfwits anymore. One bright YouTuber with the handle of "Nerdonymous" went to the trouble of fact-checking the fake film school's video/exercise in character assassination and presented his findings in a video of his own:
It's quite informative and entertaining and meticulous in citing sources -so much so that the only criticism is that it's two hours long. It's like the way Stoklassholes responded to Jim Raynor's essay not by trying to rebut the points he made, but by whining that it's over a hundred pages long.