What this poster said on another Star Wars forum about sums it up for me with regards to people wanting the ‘darker’, more ‘adult’ ROTJ that Kurtz allude to:

**"Whilst the original ideas for ROTJ are fun I do kind of feel myself understanding Lucas and the writer’s choice to go with what we got which I don’t think was just low risk and looking to sell Ewok teddies.

The second DS I think not only makes sense in universe with the reasons for the original explained in ANH but I think its an effective shorthand, we don’t need masses of exposition or a complex plot for the ROTJ climate which potentially could get in the way of the character drama.

The Ewoks and Han not dying I kind of suspect was Lucas wanting their to be a representation of “good” which Luke was fighting for. If he’d just wanted a simple heroic story then he would have outlined one for Luke yet what we get is outside of the speeder hijinx a pretty dark one, actually maybe darker than ESB. I suspect Lucas’s feeling was that was really the dramatic heart of the film and we didn’t need MORE growing darkness by having Han die, instead that plot represents goodness and which feeds into why Luke gets so angry at Vader’s threat to turn Leia."**

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