Revised saber effects in GOUT?

I feel like I should have run into discussion of this before, but I don’t recall seeing it. Apologies if asking about this in 2017 is just flogging a dead horse.

Here’s Luke being full of surprises in the Special Collection Laserdisc and Despecialized Blu-Ray:

And here’s the GOUT:

The core of Luke’s saber is much more thick and solid, and the glow around Vader’s has a sharp edge instead of a smooth fade.

Laserdisc and Blu-Ray:

Smeary GOUT:

Again, Luke’s saber is beefier, and Vader’s has a sharper glow (although with a tighter radius in this shot). You can also see that the glow on Luke’s saber has been tidied up for the Blu-Ray; it’s big and cloudy in the other two transfers, but in that one, it matches Vader’s.

What’s going on here? It doesn’t seem like whatever filtering the GOUT went through would have done this stuff on its own without seriously altering the rest of the picture.

I see no differences between the LD and the GOUT except different brightness/contrast/saturation

Oh, whoops. I just noticed that the background triangle to the left of Luke’s head in the first shot behaves exactly the same as the core of his lightsaber. I had thought that the entire image would look blown-out and gross if that kind of transformation had been applied to the whole thing, but I was clearly mistaken. Sorry for the waste of time!