It still matters if you have a display which can take advantage of anamorphic DVDs. Cropping and zooming is just a kludge. It doesn’t give you the extra resolution that anamorphic DVDs have.
Well there was no extra resolution because they were transferred in 1993 in SD. But of course, if they’d bothered to scan the three films in 2006 they could have given us anamorphic DVDs.
And yet they went to the trouble of replacing the '81 crawl… Perhaps that employee was fired for going above and beyond what was requested.
They had already scanned and cleaned that shot for Empire of Dreams.