[…/…]
Tldr; With those disjointed events that were obviously not intended to be placed in this order and the visual errors showing that R5 and Grogu were originally intended to switch places at certain plot points, it is clear that the reunion was not the original plan and that they had to massively rework Season 3 from top to bottom. It’s like they had originally shot whole planets with R5 and no Grogu at one point, and then re-shot half the scenes again to add Grogu in with a new storyline, but didn’t do a good job as Grogu is still missing from a ton of the new shots and R5 still in the background. This would also mean that Din was supposed to go to Tatooine before episode 2. Din also lands on Nevarro with Grogu still in the bubble instead of the droid port, but then R5 is following him in the next shot… So there are tons of different reshoots and VFX alterations going back and forth and it is a terribly messy presentation. There’s a lot of additional speculation/evidence out there, especially in terms of the S3 ending and some BTS leaks of Gideon scenes that were never used, but wow, from an editor’s standpoint it is crystal clear that this season was so stitched together in post production to become something that is was not originally intended to be.
Impressive detective work, but I have a problem in terms of production schedule: if they changed their plan to have Grogu in all episodes of Mando season 3 instead of R5, this decision should have occurred before or during production of Book of Boba Fett, because it’s during BOBF that we have a Mando episode showing Din being reunited with Grogu. And so if they had to rework some Mando S3 episodes, those were already filmed before BOBF was finished?