George didn’t seem to care about how bumpy things looked, just look at the Phantom Menace features. Now it’s all fluff.
Funny thing about that is that everyone pretends that he was watching something close to final when he made the “too far in a few places” comment.
We know he did, because Ben Burt gives us a sequence of events, that closely follows the final movie, pointing out the tonal issues to Lucas, and Lucas himself admits there’s little he can do about it at that stage, because of the way the movie has been constructed.
You assume way too much though. You have no idea what Lucas did or didn’t do to “diminish the effects of it”, because they don’t show the footage.
But speaking of Ben Burtt and the TPM finale, in the commentary track when Obi Wan kills Darth Maul, Burtt talks about how they were fine tuning the editing of the climax up until basically the minute they shipped the movie out, which would have been much later than the time of the “too far in a few places” screening.
You don’t know that that cut wasn’t notably worse than what Lucas ended up with.