The abruptness of how that scene ends without the reversing of the footage has been a pain point for Hal’s edit of AoTC for a while now.
Yeah, that was actually the exact problem I was trying to solve lol! My cuts are VERY different from the Hal 9000 cuts (I always work from scratch from the Vanilla version), but I did end up coming to the same conclusion Hal did a couple times in each film, cause he’s pretty good at this whole editing thing. 😉