I saw them in high school so they have a certain nostalgia, though i find nearly every single change objectionable. Except for restoring the picture, removing matte lines and expanding and restoring the sound of the films for multi track digital audio. I’m sympathetic to fixing the Landspeeder shot, but very little beyond that. The dinosaurs in the city are a joke. The quasi videogamey 90’s effects don’t hold up one bit.
The Jabba scene relays the same exact information as the Greedo scene. Preserve it for those who want the 1997 cut. I also want the original version of Phantom Menace so i can finally retire my Laserdisc.
I’d love to see the '97 versions be properly preserved. I’ve been dying for it for YEARS man. Same with Phantom Menace. The closest we have other than ZigZig’s LD upscale and his PAL SDTV cap is Adywan’s version which uses outdated LD footage (in the sense we have better upscales) and it still has one or two shots from the original DVD release. I still greatly prefer the theatrical pacing/audio though. Apparently ZigZig got his hands on a 35mm print so fingers crossed on that one.
TN1 plans on doing scans of the '97 cut after the 4kxx projects are done. I’m excited for those as well.
As a response to OP, the '97 cut is important because it was widely theatrically released for the 20th Anniversary. It was also released to satiate our appetite before the prequels were released. And they’re the only versions we don’t have proper a HD preservation of yet. For that reason alone they’re important.