Star Wars is really a cultural art piece puzzle. It becomes this rabbit-hole of changes based off what a fan wishes to see; if you change one thing, do you change everything else? I recently saw Adywan’s scene with the Emperor’s hologram from ESB:R and it hit me that’s seriously the only scene I would want in say, Harmy’s Despecialized version. The 2004 scene is beyond awful, but the concept makes total sense. The original 1980 just suffers from Lucas not sure how to do the Emperor until Jedi came out, so it’s this rather bizarre artifact that remains. But seriously, that’s the only scene in ESB that would make the Despecialized version that much more sweeter for me.
Anyway, what I’m getting at is that over the decades, there’s been additional Star Wars “puzzle pieces” materialized and all of them can get mixed and matched to create your own version of Star Wars. If by some off chance Disney released the OUT, I imagine it would still be met with criticism. Say it’s a restored and cleaned up release through and through; it still may leave a sour taste for today’s fans of Star Wars.
“Why didn’t you fix [lightsaber rotoscopping/color corrections/continuity errors]?”
The longer fans have waited for a ‘proper’ release of the Star Wars trilogy, the more headache inducing it becomes given how Star Wars has been seen differently from person to person, generation after generation, and each expect something different when viewing these films.
If anything, this period where Disney is quiet about OUT is probably actually for the best because we, the fans, have more control over how we release Star Wars. What I fear is that if a OUT gets officially released, it will kill the kind of communities we have here, where there’s more freedom and creativity to mix and match how we see Star Wars.