Firstly, I’m not making “wild, unfounded claims” I’m telling you what I think. I’m giving an opinion on what I think the plausible scenario is, which is that I don’t think they “changed their minds” on anything, I think “give em the originals on the 50th Anniversary” was the idea for awhile now, and then put forward the support for my opinion being that they’d been working on this for YEARS before anyone found out, which means they were likely planning/scheduling it YEARS before that.
If you don’t want to hear what people are telling you, if you want to wrestle every conversation into a referendum on you and your belief (or lack of it) and the trivia you can’t wait to share like we haven’t already heard it, I mean - you can do that, but I think you already know how tiresome that comes across, right?
Do you want to know what you’re talking about or do you want to be “right” on the internet? Because those are increasingly two completely different things. If you want to react to people answering your questions in good faith like a cross-examining defense attorney you can, sure. Nothing’s stopping you (certainly not a block button, which we unfortunately don’t have here). But it seems like a real weird way to go about learning stuff you don’t know.
The only evidence we have is that work started in 2022.
There’s no proof they were planning this earlier than that, which means it’s definitely possible in 2019 when JJ Abrams said that, they weren’t at that time planning to release them, but changed their mind a few years later.
I think it’s obvious if they were planning to release them back then, they would’ve told JJ Abrams privately and he wouldn’t have answered that way in the interview, saying it’s impossible. He could’ve just said “They don’t want me talking about this.” or “You’ll have to wait and see.”