In regards to the continued absence of a restored OUT, it is 100% Disney’s fault.
It’s the last remaining bite at the apple / dip in the well / whatever analogy you want to use. Seriously folks, they had to hold off on releasing the deleted scenes until the frickin’ blu-ray instead of including them on the dvd - a format known for including deleted scenes - just so they’d have a selling point other than “the iffy-looking '04 masters of the versions you hate (but will still buy anyway for some reason), now at their full resolution! …Oh, and the prequels too.”
Disney will wait until 2020 when the rights to Empire, Jedi, and the prequels revert fully to Lucasfilm.
To those who say “yeah, but even when 2020 rolls around there’s still no guarantee it will be anything other than the SE in 4k,” I say bullshit.
There’s got to be something to that story John Landis told a couple years ago, right?