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Suffering insomnia, I found myself wondering this. One of the weaknesses of the prequels in comparison to the original trilogy is the discontinuity of characters. A major part of the success of the OT was the Big 3. Episode I features Qui-Gon as the protagonist of the story but he dies at the end, with Episode II and III featuring Anakin and Obi-Wan more prominently. Padme's prominence is also less than Leia's.
Keeping Qui-Gon alive isn't going to completely mitigate the inconsistency, nor does it fix what I perceive as Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Padme being overall weaker and less interesting than the Big 3. I think his survival, though, would be beneficial from an Expanded Universe perspective, because he would be available as a character for those types of stories as well as The Clone Wars. His survival also could be written in a way that ensures Obi-Wan is the one who trains Anakin by means of the council purposely snubbing Qui-Gon by assigning Anakin to Obi-Wan, given the earlier situation in which Qui-Gon attempted to train Anakin in defiance of the council by dropping Obi-Wan.
Overall, I think it makes sense that Qui-Gon is killed because he would mostly serve as a distraction from Anakin and Obi-Wan if he featured in the next two movies, unless he was to take Dooku's role, or if used in conjunction with Maul's survival, replaced Dooku as head or a member of the CIS in opposition to the Republic, but not as a Sith. His important to the lore and to bridge from Episode I to Episode IV is also non-existent, so it makes sense that he was killed. It also raises the question of why Lucas went away from Obi-Wan BEING the Qui-Gon character and being JOINED by Qui-Gon after the Tatooine portion of the plot. I am guessing Lucas wanted the stakes to be raised in the lightsaber duel and having a minor character killed was not sufficient.
As for Darth Maul, I think his survival alone suggests that it's recognized that killing him was a mistake so early on. I am speculating that his character is going to be given much more depth than Episode I and associated EU gave him, and that he's going to be more cerebral and powerful than the living weapon he is currently viewed as. If he survived originally, this would have allowed him to replace Dooku as head of the CIS and serve that role, and probably created a much cooler lightsaber battle to open Episode III. Honestly, I really don't understand why Maul was killed off because it's not as though he couldn't have survived and there still have been a triumphant ending in the same sense as the original Star Wars. Darth Vader survived. I think Lucas realized that the lightsaber duel was ultimately inconsequential to the plot of the film and was only important to the participants as a matter of survival, and in order to have all concurrent subplots resolved favorably for the heroes he killed Maul, because Maul's survival along with Qui-Gon's death would have sharply contrasted the destruction of the droid control ship and consequent defeat of the droid army and the capturing of Nute Gunray.
While the lightsaber battle seems to be the highlight of Episode I, I'm thinking that it's ultimately unnecessary to the film, especially since Lucas was deliberately mirroring the original Star Wars. Qui-Gon's duel with Maul on Tatooine mirrors Obi-Wan and Vader on the Death Star as a lightsaber duel halfway through the film, and there wasn't a duel at the climax. The duel in Episode I is also not essential to the plot and could be excised.
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