The GOUT trilogy was very frustrating to me. On one hand, I have a fond memory of being able to view the films in their unaltered state again. I grew up with passed down VHS copies from the 80s, so even though I’m a child of the 90s, my first memories of these films were the non special editions. Even though there are one or two SE changes I admire, nothing compared to being able to watch the films the way I did the first time around.
The huge negative was that infernal letterbox aspect ratio. As a teenager I’d watch those discs on my xbox, and the options for viewing them on my TV were as a tiny box in the middle of the screen, zoomed in (which completely cut off the subtitles for the alien speak), or horribly stretched. It was always really annoying to me that I owned the unaltered films in a format I could watch on my TV again, but not at all the way I wanted to watch them.
It really makes me thankful for projects like Harmy’s Despecialized Trilogy and Project 4K77/80/83. Without the great people from this site, TheStarWarsTrilogy and elsewhere preserving the past so beautifully, we’d be stuck with an option so tedious, that the original cuts would probably get lost to history eventually.