Analysis of Star Wars: Introduction

I watched Star Wars with my daughter last night because she had forgotten most of it, and just didn't get most of cultural references. Rewatching it, I tried to recapture the storyline from the first movie. Most fans accept the first trilogy as canon, but when they made Star Wars, Lucas did not know there would be sequels. I think most of them thought that the movie would be a stand-alone space-opera that would never achieve nearly the success that it did. When I first saw Star Wars, I was a kid, so my conjectures about it were not well-defined, because I did not have the breadth of history that an adult has.
So, with that in mind, I tried to reconnect with the original story of Star Wars, and also re-imagine how the story might have played out if Kenobi had been honest. To do so, one must "unlearn" the history of the prequels and even episodes V and VI. Imagine if episodes V and VI had yet to be made. Where would Star Wars have gone if Lucas hadn't kept trying to second-guess his own narrative? This is a rather long train of thought, so I will break it down into parts.