The last i heard it was an oxymoron to release the Original. That was Lucas final word on the subject in 2011 or was it 2010. It was around the time of the blu ray release. The other thing he said was there were pipelines for these things or some other BS.
The ‘oxymoron’ thing you refer to is George saying this?:-
'Mr. Lucas said that to release the original versions of these films on Blu-ray was “kind of an oxymoron because the quality of the original is not very good.”
“You have to go through and do a whole restoration on it, and you have to do that digitally,” he added. “It’s a very, very expensive process to do it. So when we did the transfer to digital, we only transferred really the upgraded version.”
^ source: ‘Star Wars’ Films Coming to Blu-ray Next Year’ - 2010 article based on a telephone interview with George Lucas for the NY Times.
That seems to be another disingenuous statement from George given what we know now - and what has also been achieved by fans in their preservation projects.
Along with the possibility of backwards engineering the ‘new’ 1997 SE based master (used as the base for the 2019 SE version) to include the unaltered theatrical version footage - as just one possible ‘quick and easy’ solution - IF indeed there were no good quality OOT copies or backups made.