Easterhay said:

Well, Jackson has wrought more changes on his Tolkien films in a lot less time than it took Lucas to start revising his films so there's another difference. So god only knows how many versions will exist of both LOTR and The Hobbit in, say, thirty years' time.

It doesn't matter, each generation of Home Video has ALL of the versions that I can buy or ignore for the Lord of the Rings movies. The last time the OOT was up to par was on Laserdisk in 1993.

So your point is irrelevant because no one cares about the changes, they just care that EVERY version is released. Thats the difference between Lucas and EVERY director in Hollywood.