I feel pretty safe saying they were worse. The prequals weren't great - the dialog and acting left a lot to be desired, the rushed feeling of Anakin suddenly going from: "I'm questioning this Jedi doctrine" to "Murder kids? Yes, sir!" wasn't great...

... But compare that to the seeming concerted effort of the second sequel film to ignore and dismantle all the work of the first film, tear down the heroes of the original trilogy, defy the laws of the setting, and then the desperate scramble job of the third film to try and make all that damage make sense and push some kind of narrative forward with only scattered, disparate, broken bits of any kind of storyline... It's really night and day. One of these trilogies seems like a genuine effort to tell the story of the rise and fall of Darth Vader, just without the original lightning in a bottle that made the magic of the original trilogy... The other is a mess of seemingly bitter hatred for the previous writers and directors, the story, the characters and the universe as each film seeks to undo what happened in the previous one.