Rewatching Mr. Plinkett's reviews makes me wonder what could've been, and makes me want to try my hand at rewriting the prequels to be less shit, as a writing exercise. But script frenzy is over and without that I'm pretty much writing star wars fanfic impromptu.
Still though. As a kid I expected the clones to be bad guys, since it was the attack of the clones. What if the Republic is invaded by an outer rim empire of malformed vat-grown soldiers, with Grievous as Space-Bane with a vendetta against the Republic for ruining his life on some bureaucrat's signature ("we're gonna pave over your hometown cause there's space oil or some shit, greater good and all, go live somewhere else" kind of thing). The Republic's in its waning years, too bloated and overpopulated to agree to anything, and when Obi Wan and Anakin go on a mission to help protect civilians on the front Anakin gets to see first hand how impotent the Republic is as the clones go hulkamania and the Republic troops (who are volunteers so there's a human element, instead of clones fighting robots) are too ineptly managed to deal with it.
And then Anakin gets a chance to fight Grievous at the climax and gets his ass handed to him, with Grievous taunting his jedi training and the rhetoric of peace and restraint. So then Anakin's faith in the jedi order and all it stands for is broken too.
And he escapes but then in the second movie (only two, fuck TPM) Palpatine is taking advantage of the panic and disorganization to grab power and Anakin starts to identify with him instead, since he's a powerful figure who seems to know what it takes to stop the clones. The rest of the Republic agrees and the senate hands its power over to Palpatine who uses his power to form the Stormtroopers. They fight back against the clones and Anakin fights Grievous again, beats him, and executes him at Palpatine's behest, completing his dark side transformation.
Then palpatine sends him to kill the jedi, most of whom aren't warriors, and maybe the order's already in decline like the republic if Anakin killing them is too unbelievable. I was thinking a slightly Japan-influenced bent to the Jedi order, with most of the Jedi being courtiers and diplomats with a caste of warriors guarding them. That'd deal with the problem of fucking everybody having lightsabers and bring it more in line with the original movies where lightsabers were rare and Yoda and the Emperor didn't have one. Anakin and Obi Wan are in the warrior caste so they have lightsabers, Palpatine and Yoda don't, nor do the vast majority of regular jedi.
And then he goes to kill Obi Wan in some kind of space thing akin to the original trilogy and Obi Wan beats him, using his rage and recklessness against him, and sends him down into the space hole, where he's burnt and frozen and shit and has to be turned into Darth Vader.
And there you go.