In answer to the topic, this is mostly my purist side talking but older Anakin plus it looks less awkward when put next to the ghosts of Yoda and Obi-Wan.
I watched the prequels first, so I would think there was some random guy as a ghost. See my point? P.S, victory celebration is so much better than yup nub. (Stupid spelling corrections!)
Even when you see the guy unmasked moments before you would think he was some random guy? No one had any problems knowing who he was for 21 years before lucas decided to screw with things. Has the human race become so dumb that they couldn’t still figure that one out?
I’m 101% sure the guy you’re responding to is a troll, but regardless, your point is correct. The whole point was not to make it easier to understand, because no one had any trouble understanding it in the first place, but rather to inseparably tie the OT to the PT so that one could not be understood without the other. The change actually makes the scene more confusing to anyone who has not seen the prequels, and that was precisely the point. George wanted anyone who watched just the OT to be scratching their heads at the end so they would have to go back and watch the prequels. His goal was to make his preferred chronological order, which of course includes the prequels, the only coherent way to watch the films. He wanted to make the prequels an inescapable part of the saga no matter how much you resist. Having seen the prequels doesn’t make you not realize who Sebastian Shaw is because you saw him minutes earlier in the same film, but not having seen the prequels does make you not realize who Hayden Christensen is because you’ve never seen him.
And, for that matter, neither has Luke. Which is the fundamental problem with the scene that completely undermines the logic behind any excuse you could possibly think up for it. So apparently Obi-Wan and Yoda have to still be old as force ghosts, but Anakin doesn’t have to? But no, you say, they actually can appear however they want but they choose to appear the way Luke would recognize them. So why then does Anakin look like a guy who’s younger than Luke who he has never seen before and there is no way he would recognize as his father? Same problem if you want to say the scene is just Luke imagining them, because there is no way he could imagine Hayden having never seen him.
So you say then OK, well maybe they don’t get to choose and they aren’t doing it for Luke, and he’s not just imagining them, but the real reason they look that way is because they look the age they were the last time they were on the light side of the force, so Anakin really “died” when he became Vader like Obi-Wan said. To which I say that undermines the entire point of Vader being redeemed and coming back to the light side at the end, completely destroying the symbolic theme of the film. You know, the “return of the Jedi.” If he’s not a Jedi again at the end, that did not happen.
So finally you just give up and say well it was the force. The force allowed Anakin to look young again just because, and also told Luke who he was so he could recognize him. Which brings me back to the original point: Why would it not do the same for Obi-Wan and Yoda then? If Luke could recognize them through the force in their younger forms anyway, why are they still stuck being old guys, or why would they choose to be?
It. Doesn’t. Make. Any. Sense. Only way the scene completely works is the original way, with all three ghosts as Luke saw them, all three the age they were when they physically died, and all three the age they were when they became one with the light side of the force. And if you’re going to change it then you have to change Obi-Wan and Yoda too if you want it to make any sense at all. Changing Anakin alone as Lucas did is an absolute nightmare for in-universe logical consistency.