I love your idea Rogue Leader, it certainly helps reduce the feeling that the Rebellion deleted scenes just peter out into nothing. And that Obi Wan/Padme scene is like my personal holy grail of footage left completely on the cutting room floor - from what I know most of the rest is inconsequential things like Anakin killing Wat Tambor, Mace Windu having a desk etc. (though apparently there was once a super long cut of TPM - what was cut?).
Still though - and maybe it’s just because I think of Clone Wars Anakin as “Anakin” and try to justify his actions in ROTS with my understanding of that character, rather than the weirdo Lucas wrote - it’s hard for me to imagine Anakin siding with Palpatine over Padme even if he did find out she’d been secretly plotting against him, because of Palpatine being a Sith Lord. Absolutely it would be a huge source of tension before that revelation, but I just can’t see Anakin siding with Palpatine rather than the Jedi just for political reasons AFTER discovering his true identity, or choking his wife to death because she didn’t tell him about the fact she was entirely justifiably plotting against him. Dom’s suggestion would work well in just the context of the film, but personally one of my main goals with this film is to make it fit the vastly superior TCW, and that Anakin would probably be more likely to kill Palpatine on the spot.
In my eternally WIP edit, I’m leaning in hard on the desperate to save Padme angle, going as far as to mostly reduce the inconsistent tension between Anakin and Padme and Obi Wan. (Mace and the council are absolutely fair game for being vilified to help justify Anakin’s actions against Windu, of course.) I’m going to try to imply that Anakin is motivated entirely by his inability to let go of Padme since I feel that’s the only believable reason he would betray the Jedi, with it spiralling out of control from there as he has to become more and more delusional to justify his actions - Palpatine urges him to strike the Temple because otherwise the Jedi will kill the pair for what they’ve done to Windu, and Anakin is already so deep that he feels he has no other choice. Basically, a reluctant Vader, acting out of fear of having to face the consequences for what he has done, only forced to face reality when Padme rejects his suggestion that everything will be okay and leaves him instead. He killed all those Jedi while thinking to himself “I’m doing what I have to do for Padme”, right? He’s doesn’t even consider that she wouldn’t be grateful for it, and that she might even leave him over it. And when she does, he’s forced to confront that he has committed all these terrible acts and destroyed the entire life he had built with the Jedi Order for essentially no reason. Faced with the choice between collapsing into despair and accepting the death he deserves (we see him consider this in Charles Soule’s Vader comic) or doubling down and lashing out in anger, he goes for the latter (because of the dark side, perhaps) and chokes out Padme and attempts to destroy Obi Wan. I think most people have irrationally lashed out at loved ones in times of great stress when they really should’ve admitted they were wrong, though hopefully not at quite the same level of severity, so I see that as being a more relatable way for things to go. As always with fanediting, the hard part is bending the footage to my will.
Sorry, I typed all that and just remembered the thread we’re in - I’ll make my own thread for my edit in the future rather than going off in Octorox’s!