I thought the pouty thing he had going in Attack of the Clones was the worst acting I'd ever seen.

Wow. Even after the absolutely wooden performance that Jake Lloyd put in for Ep I?

There are two great tragedies for the whole Star Wars cycle (aside from the overarching pain of Lucas as a director). The first is Lucas' recent revisionist history: claiming that he never said he would make a third trilogy and that the saga is supposed to be about Anakin/Vader. If true then the first three were terribly written to show that. The second is that if this revisionism is true then it's truly sad that Anakin was portrayed so badly by the actors who played him in the movies where he truly was central.