No, they didn't. They loved it. It wasn't the new stuff that people rejected - it was the old stuff.
Let me back up. You are repeating a very common Hollywood excuse. You first really need to understand that Hollywood is bad at making movies, and they don't really understand why this movie succeeds or this movie fails. So they tell themselves convenient excuses about formulas and marketing and timing and what have you. Hollywood told themselves that the reason the prequels didn't succeed was that they were too different from the formula that made Star Wars successful. But it wasn't a formula that made Star Wars successful, at least not in the sense that they think. What made the original trilogy successful was a combination of things, but they all come down to quality craftsmanship. Quality special effects work. Quality writing. Quality musical score. Quality art direction. But most especially, quality writing that deftly introduced compelling characters, deftly moved forward the plot, and deftly mixed faster scenes of action with slower scenes of character development.
The prequels didn't fail because they were novel. In fact, the novelty of them was the main thing that the fan community accepted, and the main thing that makes them somewhat rewatchable. It's a completely different style of story than the first trilogy, involving a grand political stage with a tragic hero at its center and a love story. And it's got all sorts of great settings, costumes, cultures, and sci-fi gizmos, plus absolute the best fight choreography of any Star Wars movies and a great sound track with Williams doing something really original (for him) and bringing it choral voices. Even people who hate the movies love the novelty of 'Duel of the Fates'. All the new stuff (with the notable exception of the Gunguns and their mascot Jar-Jar) is great.
What people hated was the old stuff, and the reason that they hated it was that it simply was not well done.
People knew coming into the prequels that there were three main story beats that had to happen in the prequels. Anakin had to befriend Obi-Wan and form a great friendship with him. Akakin had to fall in love with the mother of Luke. And then Anakin had to turn to the dark side and betray the Jedi. And the problem the prequels have is that although Lucas knew those were the story beats, he really had no good idea how that had happened. He didn't have the writing chops to make any part of that story engrossing or to make the motivations of the characters believable. That's what kills the prequels.
When you think about what people really hate about the prequels it's the absence of a really believable friendship between Obi-Wan and Anakin. We don't have a lot of that great banter that we have between Han and Luke, and we don't get really sold on the fact that the two care for each other. The lines between the two are often awful, and although each man is a good actor they just can't do anything with the material. It's too didactic. It's too forced. It's too obvious. Likewise, there is a plot hoop that has to be jumped through where Padme falls in love with Anakin, but again the dialogue that is supposed to set this up is just awful, and it doesn't convincingly sell the romance. There chemistry in the scenes. There is no believable motivation on Padme's part. It comes off as corny and stupid, and is inadvertently funny when we should be moved. It fails to make the viewer want to, as my daughter would say, "'ship the characters". Likewise, we aren't given a compelling reason for Anakin's fall. It's sudden. It's poorly motivated. There are some ideas that are supposed to be driving Anakin's fall, but Lucas lacks the vision and the writing chops to really explore them well.
So it was actually the 'old' stuff that turned people off to the prequels - not the new stuff.
And what's interesting is that though the writing was weak, there are enough good ideas in the overall plot, that when you hand over these ideas to another team of writers, you get something like "The Clone Wars", which despite it's limited ambitions, and it's format, manages to do a better job of making the friendship between Anakin and Obi-Wan believable, "ship" the two star-crossed lovers, and address the stress and conflict that leads up to Anakin deciding that from his point of view the Jedi are evil. Now, it's not great, but the fan community just ate it up. In fact there are a lot of fans that feel that the characters in "The Clone Wars", like Ahsoka Tano are some of the most compelling characters in all of Star Wars.
Sure, there are always going to be people who dislike when Star Wars deviates from the tone of the original trilogy, although I'd argue that those people tend to overlook how dark the original trilogy was because they are just so used to it and still look at it with child-like eyes that they don't really think about it. So you have people who didn't like Rogue One exploring ideas like there is no such thing as a perfectly clean war. But a ton of the fans think Rogue One is at least the equal of the original trilogy precisely because while it stayed true to the setting, it introduced a lot of new things. Plus, one of the greatest 'Star Wars' fandom scenes is the scene in 'Clerks' where the protagonists debate whether the victory at Endor was clean, since the unfinished battle station almost certainly still had civilian contractors working on it. So this is not an idea that the fandom hasn't thought about.
This is incidentally the same sort of thing that happens to the Matrix trilogy. The first movie was a good movie, but it was filled with plot holes. It's one of the few movies I watched in the cinema twice, and after coming out of it the second time I told the group I was with that though it was a great movie, if they didn't patch the foundation of the movie by patching the plot holes, then they wouldn't be able to successfully build anything from it because without a firm set of rules and explanation of "why" eventually everything would be just gibberish.
The sequel trilogy kept writing itself into corners and then writing itself out of it by breaking established rules. Things kept getting less and less logical, and more and more just pure spectacle with no heart. That deft mix of pacing between action and slower moments to build character that are the hallmark of the original trilogy (and most of Rogue One, which was better paced on second viewing than I remembered) just isn't in the sequels, with the result that after 7 hours of movie we still haven't had anyone in the new "golden trio" meaningfully interact with each other.
