I still can't recommend Clone Wars enough. It's amazing.
I second Johnstantine. The Clone Wars had the unenviable task of trying to polish the PT turd, and I think it did a great job of it. There were some episodes I loved, some I liked, and some I didn't like. But overall I enjoyed and recommend it. It's a shame it was cancelled because I felt like the last season-and-a-half was when the show really found its stride.
Now we're talkin' STAAAARR WAAARS! (This is what I get for ranting at Wally and Aaz about it =)
Come on now. Admit it. This is more fun than trying to convince those scruffy-looking nerf herders that TFA isn't the The Room of big budget films.

That's a good point, but as you say the lines were blurry and a specific alternative wasn't defined or given at all, so at the time that was basically just Yoda's definition of what a real Jedi should be or how they should act. Previously Obi-Wan even refers to Vader as a young Jedi (even though that's his Sith Lord name! =), just gone bad, like a crooked cop is still technically a cop, just gone rogue or acting outside the rules; abusing their power.
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
From RotJ:
Yoda: Remember, a Jedi's strength flows from the Force. But beware. Anger, fear, aggression. The dark side are they. Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Luke... Luke... do not... do not underestimate the powers of the Emperor or suffer your father's fate you will. Luke, when gone am I... the last of the Jedi will you be. Luke, the Force runs strong in your family. Pass on what you have learned, Luke. There is... another... Sky... walker.
Luke: Ben! Why didn't you tell me? You told me that Darth Vader betrayed and murdered my father.
Obi-Wan: Your father... was seduced by the Dark Side of the Force. He ceased to be the Jedi Anakin Skywalker and "became" Darth Vader. When that happened, the good man who was your father was destroyed. So, what I told you was true... from a certain point of view.
Luke: A certain point of view?
Obi-Wan: Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view. Anakin was a good friend. When I first met him, your father was already a great pilot. But I was amazed how strongly the Force was with him. I took it upon myself to train him as a Jedi. I thought that I could instruct him just as well as Yoda. I was wrong.
Luke: There is still good in him.
Obi-Wan: He's more machine now than man. Twisted and evil.
Luke: I can't do it, Ben.
Obi-Wan: You cannot escape your destiny. You must face Darth Vader again.
Luke: I can't kill my own father.
Obi-Wan: Then the Emperor has already won. You were our only hope.
Luke: Yoda spoke of another.
Obi-Wan: The other he spoke of is your twin sister.
Luke: But I have no sister.
Obi-Wan: Hmm. To protect you both from the Emperor, you were hidden from your father when you were born. The Emperor knew, as I did, if Anakin were to have any offspring, they would be a threat to him. That is the reason why your sister remains safely anonymous.
Luke: Leia! Leia is my sister.
Obi-Wan: Your insight serves you well. Bury your feelings deep down, Luke. They do you credit, but they could be made to serve the Emperor.
Luke: Never. I'll never turn to the Dark Side. You've failed, your highness. I am a Jedi, like my father before me.
The Emperor: So be it... Jedi!
One more RotJ quote just as a middle finger to the PT:
Princess Leia: Luke, what's wrong?
Luke: Leia, do you remember your mother? Your real mother?
Princess Leia: Just a little bit. She died when I was very young.
Luke: What do you remember?
Princess Leia: Just... images really. Feelings.
Luke: Tell me.
Princess Leia: She was... very beautiful. Kind, but sad. Why are you asking me this?
Luke: I have no memory of my mother. I never knew her.
Leia, you lying son of a bitch. No wonder Luke never trained you to become a Jedi!
So, again, it wasn't what it would later become with the whole Jedi/Sith binary, which became tiresome to me very quickly. So, if they're basically going to undo that with Kylo Ren and Rey being more force users in relative positions on a spectrum of light and dark and/or essentially redefine what a Jedi is, with Rey in particular or even Luke before her, fine by me. The capital J Jedi are dead, long live "the jedi."
To me though it was never binary. I never thought all light side users were Jedi and all dark side users were Sith. There was absolutely no proof of this until The Clone Wars (and later TFA as far as the actual movies are concerned), but I always just assumed the Jedi (and the Sith once TPM came out) were like schools of philosophy, political parties, or religious sects. In other words, the Jedi/Sith were the dominant groups, but you could have multiple dark side groups, multiple light side groups, etc.
But I admit I also assumed the Empire was pretty old, being greatly disappointed when it turned out that Palpatine had only ruled for ~19 years. So my assumptions miss more than they hit.

What's interesting about all this is I feel like that "left turn" was another one of those course corrections to try and make the PT fit with the OT, however shitty and disjointed, which is why the portrayal of Anakin in the first two prequels felt so wrong from the start. OT Vader/Anakin WAS a tragic and romantic figure, an allegedly great man everyone admired but that fell, but subsequently expressed resentment and regret, and was revealed to be conflicted or tortured about it before being redeemed.
That's an interesting view. I've never thought of it like that. It does make sense.
Personally, I always saw Vader as an "end justifies the means" type. I saw him as a Jedi knight/soldier, trained by and fighting with his friend Obi-Wan, fighting a war that drags on, whose horrific experiences in battle take a toll on him so he starts becoming more and more extreme in his views and actions. This causes him to bump heads with the other Jedi (and whatever other group he was fighting for) who disagree with him and his methods. Couple that with the Emperor essentially becoming his yes man, sharing his views and telling him how right he is, while nurturing his extremism and Vader starts questioning the organizations/causes he's fighting for, whether they're capable of winning the war and bringing peace and all that. Eventually he views the groups/causes he once fought for as the enemy. The Emperor teaches him the dark side, and fueled by the anger/hate that has built up inside him the two destroy the old order and establish the Empire while Vader hunts down the Jedi to (what they think is) the point of extinction. At some point in there Obi-Wan fucks him up while trying to stop his best friend and Mrs. Vader takes his children and makes a run for it once they realize what he has become.
To me, Vader was the personification of anger/hate to the point where the Imperial Navy had a high turnover rate for officers because Vader would Force choke them to death for anything but the best of good news. At the same time he was also a true believer in the Empire (he wanted Luke to join him in killing the Emperor to rule the Empire instead of killing the Emperor to destroy the Empire) and the dark side (both he and the Emperor wanted Luke to join the dark side) even if he was essentially a slave to the Emperor. It wasn't until he found out his son was still alive that the spark of good in him was reignited, culminating in his act of selfless love for his child that washed him of his anger/hatred and put him back in the good graces of the Force.
Knowing the angle from which I viewed Vader, when the first two PT films came out it made sense. TPM presented Anakin, his future baby momma, the start of his relationship with Palpatine, and the foundation for a strained relationship with the Jedi. AotC furthered this with the flowering of his relationship with his baby momma, furthered his relationship with Palpatine, furthered his rocky relationship with the Jedi, started his path towards the dark side, and even had him starting to see a dictatorship as preferable to the inept republic when it came to the war effort. So for me when RotS came out, and Lucas turned Anakin from a Jedi knight with a moral compass skewed by the horrors of war and Palpatine's influence into a rube who was sold a bill of goods by a snake oil salesman, only realizing his mistake after he was trapped, it seemed to come out of left field.
Anakin in the prequels is more a study in what Lucas described as a selfish person becoming an evil one, or the true origin of an evil person and what they really are. I'd almost give Lucas credit for this boldness, "fuck Darth Vader" if everything wasn't so disjointed. Otherwise he'd be admirable for not aggrandizing Vader but instead rejecting that conventional wisdom and saying, no, Vader's not a badass, he's a bad human being, he was a pathetically selfish person that turned to evil and that's why he ended up the way he did. Anakin was always a bad guy, just not a Bad Guy yet, but still always a petulant pissbaby you wouldn't even want to be in the same room with, let alone admire. Which makes the unnecessarily forced "left turn," where it's like Palpatine hypnotizes him or something, doubly strange, because there's literally two different versions of the same story happening at once, either of which would work apart, but both together create an awful case of cognitive dissonance coming from both sides of the series. This also creates the mental switch in one's view of the saga overall where Vader/Anakin goes from being the baddest dude in the galaxy, a man whose decision the world literally turned on, to a total loser and a patsy.
I couldn't agree with you more, my friend.
Before that, I think it was natural to extrapolate Luke's arc, and his temptation and flirtations with the dark side, as a parallel to Anakin's, with the alternative outcome that he does turn, but was worth redeeming because ultimately he wasn't so different from Luke (and his redemption validated Luke and vice versa, instead of Luke just saving his loser dad). It turned out to be much more straightforward though, Luke didn't turn to the dark side because he was ever and always a good and loyal person, Anakin never was.
I agree. I can't speak for Lucas, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's what he was shooting for when he made all those parallels between ANH and TPM. Why he didn't continue down that road is beyond me though. Unless he did, but he did such a bad job at it that we can't tell.

You mean his CLONE'S CHILD with Jyn Erso!?
Well, yeah, DUH, I thought the foreshadowing in TFA was OBVIOUS! Otherwise, she's clearly the product of the combined DNA of Obi-Wan, Luke and Anakin delivered through Han's penis unto the then fertilized eggs of Princess Leia (given Rey's natural abilities, that would make the most sense actually =).
We joke, but when you look at some of the Anakin/Vader shit they were really considering for TFA, to the point of doing the concept art for it, nothing would surprise me. I know it's not popular with the "cool" Star Wars fans, but just make her Luke's daughter, please. We've already got Rogue One for the anti-Skywalker perverts that want the point of Star Wars to be its minutia.
I try not to delve too much into TFA's earlier scripts and ideas. I think it'd just detract from my feelings for the film. I looked up two deleted scenes because they answered the two big questions I had after watching TFA, the lightsaber one I mentioned earlier and the other explaining why Kylo is such a dark side/Vader fanboy despite the fact Vader turned good again (Snoke convinced him that Vader turning good was a moment of weakness in his dying moments, it turns out), but when I watched a third deleted scene it was one that would've made the film's haters go apeshit if they had included it. So I decided to call it a day on diving into the film's development.
I just assumed Rey is Luke's daughter. In the film it's mentioned she has dreams or something of a father/parental figure and, associated with it, an island. At the end of the film she finds Luke... on an island. I thought the case was closed, but some very recent interviews on the subject are starting to make me a little nervous that they're going into another direction. Or maybe they think the obvious clue in TFA is super subtle so they're teasing what we already know. (And given that most of the SW fandom is obsessed with the "who's her parents?!" question makes that just as likely.) If they put some random asshole, or Imperial midi-chlorian research facility, on an island in The Last Jedi I'm going to be pissed.

As I've said before, Anakin in the Clone Wars is what he should have always been. The movies ruined his character on screen 100%, but CW redeems him. It actually has the time to show a natural progression to the dark side (losing friends, getting fed up with the Jedi order, etc). It makes sense when watching it over five seasons, as opposed to three movies. It's why he's probably my favorite character in the entire SW universe, movies and all.
CW does so many great things. I like that they turned the clone troopers from faceless CGI cannon fodder into actual people fighting an actual war. I like that they showed Palpatine's consolidation of power beyond just playing the republic and the Jedi for fools. I like that they elaborate on how the war affects the Jedi order. (The one scene from the final season where
Yoda has that vision
of how the Jedi temple and the Jedi used to be before their decline, made my heart break because it was such a beautiful, peaceful place full of peaceful philosopher-types.)
Count Dooku's escape from Hondo's jail was also incredible. He seemed so tame for a Sith lord in AotC and the early CW episodes, but him murdering all those pirates as he calmly escapes gave me a "holy shit this guy really is a dark side monster" feeling of disgust in my stomach. And, of course, it gave us the total badass Cad Bane.
Speaking of Cad Bane, whatever happened to Rogue One's villains being the bounty hunters from ESB as well as Cade Bane in his live action film debut? Before the film came out I remember being really excited about that announcement. How did Saw Gerrera make the cut but Bane didn't?!