The lightsaber duel in ROTS is incredible

It was terrible. Comically overlong with nonstop contrived nonsense, all capped off by an idiotic conclusion.

Disney Star Wars being terrible doesn’t magically absolve and redeem the awful prequels.

"I want revenge for losing my friends so I'm going to side with the people who killed my friends. I'm also going to hunt more of the people like my friends."

It's actually kinda bad but the style/effort put into it is good. A lot of people wrongly criticize the style of fighting in the prequels because it seems too dance-like but they don't take into account that force users are basically having a meta precognizant duel rather than a normal sword fight. Force users can basically see a second or two into the future which completely changes how fights would be conducted, and is how they deflect light-speed projectiles (though I think the Disney trilogy never incorporated this concept). That said, it was still kinda overbaked and Michael Bay-y to have any long term rewatch value.

I'll take it over the way lightsabers have been handled since, though.

Whenever I saw episode 7 I was taken aback by how shit the lightsaber fighting was that I actually contrived a way for it to make sense.. I thought it was intentionally bad because in this era there are so few force users who have lightsabers that the only one with any "training" here, Kylo Ren, literally couldn't get any experience with it and then he was also fighting someone who literally has no experience. That's lame as fuck because it means the fights are gonna suck, but it made sense to me at the time.

Nope, turns out the movie makers just fucking suck and nothing was planned and no one was willing to put in any effort.