I’ll be that guy. Because, in many ways, I AM that guy.
One thing though is that plenty of home video releases are NOT the pinnacle of image quality. Some smear DNR all over the place, some UHD have even had parts of images with less detail than the DVD releases (for all the images and parts of images with way more detail than the blu-rays, DVD, 4k projects, there are parts of frames on some Star Wars UHD that have less detail than the 4k projects or even the DVDs like where they smushed out bark texture on Endor in some frames or dropped a smoothing brush circle on some frames or how they smeared out all the very deepest shadows to have less detail than the blu-ray used to, that said plenty of other bits have way, way more detail). Many have a weird, over-processed computery look. Some still use old home masters with haloing. Many have rid the grain to the extreme and tried to force film to look like digital camera shot stuff but that often comes out weird and artificial looking, not like film at all, but not like real digitally shot stuff either (which doesn’t look waxy and strange).
I think the idea of fan restoration is still pretty edgy, and unheard of among “normal” people. When people >finally hear about it, they might think it’s some garbage-quality project, or worse, that it’s a scam and >people are passing off upscales and regrades as film scans.
The ironic thing is some commercial releases seem to be upscales themselves, and some done poorly at that, look at Footloose blu-ray, it’s has pixel blocks and jagged stairsteps and looks like a poor DVD upscale or something. And most UHD are upscales of 2K DI.
And to the point here, I mean they certainly do have the elements to make the original OT in better quality. Just like they could easily have given the prequel deleted scenes to us in HD instead of tossing crappy DVD mastered versions of them in poor quality SD at that.