I wouldn’t go that far. Had Lucas stopped in '81 and released that version on DVD and later on BluRay, I probably wouldn’t care. But since that didn’t happen, A New Hope now stands for the first glimpse of the revisionist bullshit that was to come. And now, I associate it with the Special Edition, rather than the '81 home video release (or the theatrical re-release).
I was being decidedly unserious.
That’s how I took it. I just wasn’t sure if you were implying that I was too harsh on the '81 version.