Honestly, I'm a grandpa and I still don't mind JJB. But that's because I see the whole damn franchise as irritating. I'm old enough to remember what George Lucas was doing before Star Wars, with American Graffiti and THX 1138 and how he lucked out with Star Wars and has never looked back. I remember how derivative and unoriginal the series is. I never saw it as anything but crash-boom up on the screen, something to munch popcorn to and quote the occasional cheesy meme line. I saw the Star Wars Holiday Special first-run on TV.
It's the people who got blinded early, who saw Lucas' work as genius in the first place, who had room for Jar-Jar to disappoint them. Those of us who know the difference between science fiction and a shoot-em-up Western in space were never disappointed, because we always saw the series for the derivative pablum it was.
Sure, Jar-Jar's irritating.
So is C3PO, Jabba the Hut, Chewbacca, Luke Skywalker and his "gee whiz I'm just a farmboy" act, the eccentric screen wipes, the utterly bland Leia, the "made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs" technobabble bullstuff dialog, the forced love story lines, and most especially the ass-pull revisionism that Lucas has disappeared up his own starfish with for the past three decades now.
You're all welcome to get your deep life truths from Jedi mystical-babble if you want. I already sat through that stuff in Kung-Fu, Buck Rogers, and Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, so everything Star Wars could ever show me was already tired old cliches and stock tropes before Lucas ever picked up his camera.
Sure, Star Wars is entertaining. It's entertaining as a guilty pleasure only, a greasy burger basket full of zap-pow laser fights and rubber-suit aliens and hokey Saturday morning cartoon action. Jar-Jar Binks is nothing but one more burger coming down the conveyor belt of the burger factory.
