For the opening of Dark Force Rising I think showing the title after the shot of Anakin (option 2) fits best, maybe you could have the title music fade in as we zoom in on Anakin to make it blend more(?).

Man, what a big upgrade V2.0 of The New Padawan is! The way you further streamlined the episode makes it flow so much better. With the content you had to work with it’s amazing just how great it works, a most impressive salvaging work.

I really like opening on the space conflict above the planet before going down to the surface, I think it works great and feels more like proper Star Wars than awkwardly opening on some speeder bikes treking across a random city. I totally agree on the ‘show not tell’ principle, and on that note, I like the opening texts on principle as a way to give context to the episodes (and change it when needed), but I think some bits often feel redundant. In this case I don’t think is necessary to say that comunications have been cut off - the first line of dialogue in the episode is a droid saying they’re jamming their comunications, and we later hear from Yularen that they’re unable to reach them. So I think we get enough context from the episode itself.