I might try to make an example later and see what it might look like.
If that doesn’t work or seems too different, another option could be to remove a few segmented panels out of the dish itself, which might achieve a more subtle change that it could still make it feel incomplete. Although it might be less effective than completely removing the dish, it’s a potential middle ground.
Regarding the Luke hologram, I think how you handle it sort of depends on your interpretation of Luke’s plan. Do you want to keep the fact that Luke gifted the droids to Jabba, since it implies he wanted to get R2 in there? Or maybe he was betting on Jabba just keeping the droids for himself.
Could the message just be R2 beeping a bit to them (maybe with 3PO chiming in with surprise that they’re the gift, rather than the hologram. Then, you could add/change Jabba and Bib’s subtitles to provide the context: Luke wants to bargain for Solo’s life and he is gifting the droid’s as a token of good will.
Yes there’s probably a couple different ways you could do it.
As for Luke’s plan, that’s never going to make sense. It’s probably worth pointing out that the original idea was that Luke needed to bring them out into the open on the sail barge because staging an escape/rescue in the palace would’ve been supposedly nearly impossible. That’s really the only explanation for what goes down but I can’t think of anyway to spell that out, so we’re left with what we’re left with. The question then becomes, do you want it to seem like things are going according to the plan or not? I sort of lean towards wanting it to seem like things just keep going wrong (bit more exciting), but they’re able to pull it out in the end (whether the set backs were planned or not being ambiguous). To that end, of the options I tend to think that the “gift” aspect should be left out, as should the scene where Leia/Boushh gives Jabba Chewbacca - so when we first see Chewie he’s already a prisoner (this is a pretty common edit idea, which is helped by the fact that 3PO has a line of dialogue that basically sets this up).
Of course the other thing propelling such changes is the fact that the Jabba’s palace section is just interminably long, so cutting out at least a couple scenes would do it a lot of good.