The problem is threefold.
1) They have used the pressing master instead of the telecine master.
2) They have used the NTSC pressing master.
3) They have used the post 'noise/dirt reduction' master.
The reason the pressing master is a problem is that laserdisc is notoriously 'soft' and so were the televisions of the day.
So when making an LD pressing master it was not at all unusual to crank up the sharpness and do some edge enhancement as well, in the hope that the laserdisc would then look more detailed.
When using it to master a DVD the problem is that the sharpening and EE used is of course old technology and has the side effect of causing edge ringing and making the grain jump out at you and punch you in the face. Some DVD players also have sharpening 'built in' and many people have the sharpening function on their TV cranked to 100 as well. This combination makes the grain near unwatchable. Turn off any player and TV sharpening and it gets a little better, but is still too much.
Using the NTSC pressing master brings a few problems with it, most of which are just due to the very low resolution of letterbox NTSC, and the over zealous sharpening routines. Jaggies are completely unavoidable when you have less than 280 lines to work with and if you then sharpen it further.
There also appears to be some 'field wobble' in the NTSC telecine process. This can happen if the telecine device uses a field based (interlaced) camera instead of a progressive scan one (non interlaced). This can also happen for other reasons, but this is one possible cause.
What can happen is the film frame can move slightly inbetween the capture of field one and field two, which means the fields end up out of alignment slightly.
This is definately the case with the star destroyer (that the fields are misaligned - the cause of the misalignment is up for debate), and it can be fixed somewhat by selecting out each field and moving one field in relation to the other by a sub-pixel adjustment to get them back in alignment.
It is a technique we used on the X0, the final shot of the star destroyer is much improved.
The use of the post 'dirt reduction' master adds insult to injury with the ghosting, smearing and loss of detail.
As for which one I would buy, I bought the PAL GOUT of ANH, and after taking a look at it posted it to George along with a letter stating my disappointment at how the PAL territories have been treated with this release. (Didn't mention the whole laserdisc thing, just that a PAL upscale from an NTSC master was an unaccetably cheap way to treat fans when a PAL master existed.)
I have ordered the NTSC version but it hasn't arrived yet.
So I haven't sighted the NTSC version yet, but the PAL version was obviously an upscale, and if you wanted to have a PAL anamorphic version for your own personal viewing pleasure it makes more sense to get the NTSC version, upscale it to PAL anamorphic, run it through combustion's grain reduction along the way, and pop the PCM audio track or the 5.1 track on there to your preference.
It is not surprising that the PAL laserdiscs have more detail in places than the NTSC upscaled GOUT, you are starting off with a lot more lines of resolution and what appears to be a lighter dirt reduction treatment. You have the generational loss with laserdisc (which