Couple of videos ive been watching here and there about Star Wars lore, and one of the things I despise the most is how many have high reverence for Luke Skywalker as a jedi master.
I mean, im my eyes, hes probably the WORST jedi in the entire franchise. Not for lack of potential, but for how late he started training, and how rushed it was.
Anakin was deemed old being a kid. Luke started no earlier than in his teenage. All his training probably werent more than a couple of Youtube quality video being played in a very small time interval.
Him being on par with Vader only made sense in my eyes for the following situations:
1. Maybe Vader was really in his last leg in life. With his movements completely hindered by his machine body and age, maybe this narrowed the difference in physical combat with Luke.
2. Maybe in the end, Anakin wasnt never really that strong. Most his relevant fights were defeats in the first 3 movies. So, its not surprise he sucked so much to lose for a wanabe jedi like Luke.
You have to remember that the Original Trilogy was made by Lucas in a highly different state of mind.
For instance, in the OT when he wrote them, Lightsabers had recently been reconceptualized as a Jedi/Sith only weapon, whereas in his original drafts they were originally called Laser Swords and had a clunky belt + cord combo and were extremely heavy, hard to wield. And people other than Jedi used them, and originally Anakin used a red laser sword even before falling to become a Sith.
He kept the idea that they were hard to wield, without ever really explaining it ever in the OT.
So other ideas were also a lot different than they wound up being in the Prequels. And Disney is all a wreck, so please disregard most of it (except the first two seasons of Mandalorian, those can stay).
Anyway, Luke's training was not done by council rules, as the Jedi Council did not exist anymore. It was given to him out of desperation, and his bevy of attachments and emotions as an adult trainee are why he
failed his first round of training with Yoda.
While we're only shown some minutes of training on Dagobah, remember that in the OT especially, the movies made use of understood time lapses. Like, Luke is on Dagobah training for as long as Han Solo, Leia, and all of them are stuck fixing the Millenium Falcon in that Asteroid Worm. And Luke is still training when they travel to and spend the night in Cloud City. He was likely there training for a couple of weeks, minimum.
He also had that small bit of in flight training in the very first movie from Obi-wan, and Obi-wan's spirit guiding him at every step of his journey.
In his first fight with Vader, Vader was merely trying to capture him. That's why he knocks him into the Carbonite freezing hole. But Luke was trained enough to Force Jump out of it in time. Vader wasn't trying to beat Luke, and Luke still managed to land some grazes on Vader, but he ultimately lost and lost his hand.
There's a year or something like that time lapse between Empire Strikes Back and Return of The Jedi. In that time, Luke constructed his own lightsaber, mastered Force Persuasion, and became confident in his powers. But he doesn't know everything, and so he goes to return to Dagobah after saving Han Solo from Jabba the Hutt. When he gets there, Yoda is dying. Yoda tells him of his sister and that Vader is his father, and then Yoda dies.
He has a ghost chat with Obi-wan about it. And this is where we get our first shade of grey for the Jedi. They had wanted Luke to kill Vader, believing Vader to be irredeemable. And they thought that if they told Luke the truth, it would drive him into Vader's arms and let Vader play him against them.
But Luke then resolves to redeem Vader, and
that is why he is great. The OT was the ultimate redemption story. In the old masters' minds, Anakin Skywalker was dead, because to them, Vader was beyond redemption.
The Emperor comes into play in Empire Strikes Back and then again in Return of The Jedi. He exists in the plot to be the negative force that seduced Anakin to the Dark Side.
If you rewatch the Throne Room scenes, those scenes aren't really about the lightsaber fight between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. Their sword strokes against one another are merely outward manifestations of their inner struggles. Vader's struggle in being slave to The Emperor and the Dark Side, and Luke's struggle to free and redeem him.
And in the end, through their intense personal connection as Father and Son. Through Luke throwing away his weapon. Through his passionate plea, Vader kills The Emperor and is redeemed.
This proves that Obi-wan and Yoda were ultimately wrong. That the old Jedi ways were wrong.
Luke was then the only living Jedi. The only living, trained Force user. And with his knowledge and resolve, he could have built a new order with a new mentality. And you see that in a lot of the old EU stories, where he then turns into the writer's power fantasy.
But...
When Lucas made the Prequels, he had changed as a person, and he was also more motivated by money, since he had been living a lavish lifestyle and also gone through multiple divorces. Star Wars then became a means to an end, and due to letting so many EU stories, games, comics, and other media grow up over the decades, what Star Wars was and what it was perceived to be began to change in the public eye. The public, at large, doesn't appreciate nuance or complexity in writing or themes. Just about everyone who's a big fan of the Prequels missed the forest for the trees when it comes to how the Jedi Order is portrayed. You have the mathematical Midichlorian count. You have the council only willing to take and train toddlers, so that they can be indoctrinated to the beliefs of the Jedi without forming their own moral code or thoughts. You have a council that participates in Galactic Politics, rather than in fostering their own order as their main focus. You have the dramatic irony that their downfall and nemesis are right there, right under their noses, but they've lost their way so much to a cold calculus of sorts that they can't sense him.
And it was largely the rule of cool at work, undermining this subtle thing. The lightsaber had become intensely choreographed, almost acrobatic displays. The meaning behind them was disconnected, disenfranchised. They became shows of power, rather than of internal struggle.