I don’t know if George Lucas is really behind the holdup. After all, he did release the OOT in 2006 (albeit in bad video quality). And he’s even mentioned that restorations are expensive, and so he gave the SE’s priority when deciding what to restore. This tells me that it was more an issue of him not wanting to spend his own time & money on what he considers to be “rough drafts”.

So I think the real question is: does Disney think it’s worth the time & money to restore the OOT when the SE’s seem to be selling just fine? I hope the answer to that question is “yes”, but it doesn’t seem to be, given how Mike Verta described the executives to be either “skittish” or “uninterested”. What I’m really hoping is that, one of these days, Disney sees how popular some of the fan restorations/recreations are and decides to capitalize on that with their own official release.