It isn’t just about better droids, therefore George will do a better job. I’m talking in a sense that the actual development of the droid, and specifically the droid army, could have helped the story, threat, fear carry some weight within the movie(s).
I reference Greivous because of what he was. An organic cyborg, that thought, and had anger, and hatred, and was tactically brilliant, and gave the Jedi a run for their money. Make more focus on him, and then, have MORE of him. Instead of one damn interesting droid, create hundreds of them.
Have ranks. General, Corporal, Private, etc. Swat teams, Seal Teams, heavy teams, rescue groups, etc. Have James Bond-esque assassin droids. Droids that sneak in behind enemy lines and have numerous ways to disable their enemy. (think of if it was actual assassin droids that got in to harm Padme instead of stupid worms) But smart, stealthy, thinking, sneaky droids, that could cause the republic or the rebellion harm, like you were saying, you see a pilot scream in fear before crashing, you feel that. Imagine a shadow creep over a guard standing watch, and suddenly the life blinks out of him. Or a droid that drops in the middle of a hangar, and absolutely wreaks havoc on the pilots and their ships. You could have created a Droid planet, and given them a “humanity” that you wouldn’t think was possible, to this point.
We got nothing even remotely close to that.
Now take all that, and add a Maul, and maybe 2-3 different kind of Sith/Dark Jedi/Ren type characters, and suddenly, the Jedi order is absolutely stretched to their limit. At the same time, while you make the droids more interesting, like the Clone Wars cartoon, you could make the actual Clones more interesting as well. Not all of them, of course, but you could create a few. Rex and his crew, etc. Make them more interesting. Show some of them with a little personality. Let them interact with the Jedi like they did in Clone Wars series.
Doing all this, would have helped George a little, sure, but with better script writing and a truer outline, he could have cleaned up with stuff like this. You still have Anakin, Obi Wan, Palpatine, Mace, Yoda, Padme, etc to develop and alter how that story was told. You could add Boba Fett, not have all that Jango clone stuff, just the actual Boba involved in the story (or at least late in the story perhaps)
Clearly, I know the script was the largest pat of the issue. And this is only working to clean up some of the issues, it wouldn’t fix all. I know that. But it would be a start, and in “MY” prequels, in my head, that would be some of the first steps I took to create that All droid movie he had in mind, with the tweaks and plot points needed to show the Anakin transformation. Hell, do it right, you could even show some of the irony in Anakin getting hurt, and becoming part machine/droid himself.
Man, something like this could have been great on screen, I wish I was a better/smarter writer, I would try to give a concise plot outline, and show what we could have seen in the Anakin trilogy.