Welcome, Batmatt92, and thanks for the insightful suggestion. I can’t help but agree with you, with the real question being whether removing those shots of the planet surface will leave the sequence an abrupt mess. I’ll test it out and see, but I frankly doubt it’ll be as good as it needs to be, given that we’re editing a fully baked final product rather than doing it this way from the beginning.
And, as much as I love the little moment with Leia in the deleted scene, I doubt I’ll use it. The scene, as presented on the BluRay, begins and ends extremely abruptly, with not even a split second of buffer. Given the one place in the movie it would need to go, I don’t think it would be seamless. It’s a shame these deleted scenes weren’t presented to us the way the prequels’ were on DVD: as spruced up finished sequences, for the most part, presented in the same quality as the main features themselves.