You raise some very good points there about both the story and the crawl. The crawl I can probably refine much more, so I’ll think more on that, and your input will be valuable there.

On Ventress I feel I’m more limited. In the original Christophsis episodes her appearance was pretty much as you see it here. She appears, she disappears, she’s no longer involved in the plot. At one point a traitor clone implies he’s been paid off by her, but that plotline doesn’t have any bearing on the wider Christophsis story either. So there you’re not seeing so much of a fan edit as me kind of permitting myself the original episode’s flaw.

I opted to keep her because it serves to introduce her to this show (having first appeared in the Tartakovsky miniseries) and because she’s relevant especially to the first half of the first season. If you were to watch them all in one season, or to watch these episodes merged as with Smudger’s first movie, it might land better.

I had hoped to use the opening crawl to imply that her purpose was to distract the Jedi from the fact that they’re landing an army. Maybe I should make that more explicit in my streamlining of the text. Interested in your thoughts here.

You may find the second episode similarly a little messy, as it’s the next weakest, but I hope you’ll get value out of the show from there! It gets massively better as it goes.