I should point out that Star Wars won an Academy Award for editing (due in no small part to the work of Marcia Lucas), so being in awe of its original editing is not unwarranted.

I should also point out that in the very first post-theatrical edit to Star Wars (in which the crawl was revised in 1981 to give Star Wars an episode number and title), the editors fucked up so badly that you have to watch an entire planet miss its audio cue by several seconds at the beginning of every single home video release of Star Wars except the GOUT.

And that pretty much set the bar for all future edits to the OT. Regardless of who’s to blame, Star Wars editing has been an unqualified shitshow since the revisions started.