Thanks! I’m ultimately not going to be reframing Onaconda, but I’ve reordered some scenes and cooked up some dialogue to achieve the following:

Padmé, Bail, and Mon Mothma are now more of a team. There’s a feeling that they’re competent strategists - deliberately drawing the Senate conversations into a particular direction so that essentially Bail and Mon Mothma set 'em up, so Padmé (the best speech maker) can knock 'em down. (I did cut a lot of good Bail stuff from the episode, so I’m glad I got to reemphasise him in this capacity.)
The two thugs are now not mere thugs used for hassling senators, but assassins who specialise in killing them. What was dialogue where they talk about how many senators they’ve just intimidated is now them giving Dooku their senator-killing credentials because they expect to be asked to put a hit on her. But Dooku now references “my master’s plan” - which now refers to (1) the now-preceding conversation where Padmé spilt the beans to Palpatine, making Dooku’s use of the assassins an immediate reaction to this suprise threat, and (2) the fact that he CAN’T have them kill her, implicitly because Padmé is necessary to the corruption of Anakin to the sith. (Why Dooku would allude to this to some assassins is a little stretch, but I think it’s important for him to tell the audience, and the Sith in TCW do have a history of oversharing with their assassins, so I think it’s fine.) So now their plan is simply to harm Onaconda to draw Padmé out, and then to only injure Padmé enough for her to not be able to deliver her speech, which fails due to some lucky police presence.

Edit is coming along nicely, I’m really excited to share it!