it’d also be good to hear from you what you think does work, because that’s useful reinforcement
This is, unfortunately, more difficult to do than pointing out what doesn’t work. My approach to my reviews was to watch your edit, and when I felt that something didn’t work quite right, hop on over to another tab my legally purchased DVDs of The Clone Wars to see what exactly was changed vs the original. When everything works fine, then I don’t notice the edit at all, which is the goal. I will say that I think your episode selection is a very good one, and focuses on the highlights of seasons 1/2 while leaving out forgettable and bad episode arcs. I’m still not sure how I feel about including the Nightsisters arc this early (and I’ll admit the continuity of their outfits bugs me a bit), but maybe I’ll see how it works together moving forward. I think you’ve also done a really good job trimming out a lot of unnecessary gags and asides that were mostly there to fill out the runtime or make jokes that didn’t always land.
501st
I’m aware that the cuts were deliberate in order to only give a brief introduction to the characters, but what I think this ends up doing is creating a strange half-measure of introduction. What is left is still in the context of setting up and building off of conflicts/plot threads that are now just left dangling in an unsatisfying way. If you really just want the bare minimum of telling us who the characters are, I would almost say go hard in the other direction and leave out Cadets entirely. Rookies was designed to work on its own, so it at least gets the job done. The downside to this would be that 99 just kind of pops up out of nowhere for the finale.
Nightsisters
My recommendation to bring back the invisible fight is one I feel less strongly about than others, so long as you can make the following dialog feel more clear (I also gave feedback on that specifically as well in case you decided to go that direction.) Same goes for the first two fights - just make it feel more natural (I really don’t like the new phrase “let the game begin” and the cut from Ventress saying “begin” to someone else saying “begin” is weird.)
Mandalore
I agree the Dr Evil conveyer belt is goofy, but the way the replacement is handled feels very disorienting and confusing to watch on its own. I’d have to take a really close look at the original scene to see if there’s a way it could be handled better.
artefact
Just gonna point out that there are a number of instances of Star Wars spelling this specific word the American way, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen them use the British spelling of words in general: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Sith_artifact