Seeing what I have now in a box set thanks to Harmy and njvc, I don’t see how an official release can get much better than that!
Sure but it’s the principle of it.
Exactly.
Even Harmy doesn’t want his work to be the closest we’ll ever come to a true restoration of the films. He’s doing this in the hope that Lucasfilm will get around to it themselves, using film elements closer to the o-neg that literally no one else except maybe Fox possesses.
I feel like there’s no way Kathleen Kennedy hasn’t at least heard about despecialized. With any luck, Harmy’s efforts have lit something resembling a fire under the people in charge of these decisions at LFL.
Despecialized is great in the meantime, don’t get me wrong. It would be my hope that Harmy uses as many 35mm sources as he can to replace the altered shots for the 1080p version, getting it as close to a true restoration as he can without resorting to all the tricks he used in the early versions to “recreate” the unaltered shots.