Same as the title,
While I was just a little shit when I watched the Alien movies, around eight or nine, even then I could tell I didn't like Alien 3 as much. Everything was orange, none of my favorite characters from Aliens (Read: Everyone who survived) were around with the exception of Ripley, and even then they had made her bald, to my tiny mind I thought the movie was flat out stupid.
I still don't like it even today, of course for more mature reasons, but the point stands that Alien 3 is often considered to be where it all went wrong. I've learned about the original scripts that had ideas like the UPP, and following Hicks and Bishop instead of Ripley. And to be honest while it may have been jarring at first, those original concepts could have served us way better than what we got in the end with all of the studio meddling and re-writes.
I think my biggest problems, however, didn't come until the shit-show that was Resurrection. With it, we got an entirely new United Systems government, which I suppose was the end result of the fall of Weyland-Yutani at the hands of a combination of revolutionaries in the United States, UPP, and what we know as the CLF. This did more catastrophic damage to canon and the Aliens universe than that retarded Hybrid alien ever could. Weyland-Yutani is just sort of gone, and with it went the interesting story elements that a megacorp brought to the universe. Personally I loved the idea of a sort of Neo Cold War in space involving the UPP and the Company backed USCM. I drool over the potential of using that conflict as a backdrop to further capture the fear of the Xenomorph. To further develop Wey-Yu as a sort of shapeless and ever present antagonist, driven by profits and continued control in human space to continue those profits. At the same time they could have shown that living under the UPP probably sucks even worse for different reasons. It could all be very allegorical to recent history in the modern era, with the added bonus of being great sci-fi and including our favorite alien species as a major story element.
I'm rather disappointed by the cop out we got as an answer to these obvious mistakes, that directors and executives have decided that instead of fixing this ruined canon, they're starting to look to the past to explore details that I'm not sure many people wanted to know. We're getting prequels instead of sequels in the form of Prometheus and Covenant, revealing the origin story of the Xenomorph and demystifying the Space Jockey by turning it into the Engineers. Being honest I really didn't want to know anything about the Space Jockey before it became the Engineers, and the "precursor race that life seeded everyone" has become a really tired and safe as fuck sci-fi trope that feels incredibly lazy, but that's neither here nor there.
What did you guys want to see before Alien 3? Were any of you around when the movie dropped in theaters? What did you think about it, and how would you have changed it?