I rather like how you’ve implemented the changes, especially cutting from the conference room to the paltry search effort. The only gripe I have is the skeleton suddenly appearing behind the droids in the scene. Would it make sense to incorporate it into the establishing shot?
I’m not gonna lie, the thought totally crossed my mind. The two problems I ran into were that I don’t have a good shot of the skeleton from an angle that would make sense to insert it, and the continuity of the unaltered Threepio sequence is itself kinda wonky (So is the scene were the droids split up. . .). If you pay attention the dragon actually does a bit of teleporting shot to shot in the original sequence.
In the end I decided that the skeleton is in on a dune in front of the camera for the whole sequence until it pulls back at the end. The close shot of Threepio is still a bit wonky with this logic, but I didn’t feel like repainting and roto-ing that shot, because the sense on the sequence still gets across to the viewer clearly.