It's the old saw about how any scene should be advancing at least two of three things: plot, character, world. (My preference is for it to be doing all three, and if it can do some thematic work as well, that'd be even better.) My problem with establishing shots--and maybe I should have been clearer that this is my problem as a writer, not necessarily something I've had problems with as a reader--is that all I was doing was saying: Look, here are some characters. Look, here is a setting. The scenes were uninteresting and achieved nothing that later scenes weren't doing just as well.

I was doing the same thing with establishing shots, in other words, that I'm complaining about as a failing of prologues.

I agree that the this happened a long time ago and nobody in the story has any reason to talk about it prologue can be just fine--as long as it's actually, you know, interesting. (I haven't read any of your books--yes, I suck! it's true!--so that's not aimed at you in any way, shape, or form.) Or, of course, there's the opposite problem. We watched Hellboy a couple weeks ago, and the most interesting and engaging human character (as opposed to Hellboy himself) in the entire movie was the young Professor Bruttenholm. I spent most of the movie with part of my mind sad and cranky that we didn't get to see more of him. (And, no, lovely as John Hurt is, the old professor was not an adequate substitute.) So the prologue backfired a little.