I think more opportunities may exist to take advantage of this new and exciting characterization of threepio. This is much more in line with the "We seem to be made to suffer" threepio we meet in ANH.
I love cutting him out of TPM and only hesitate slightly at the "500 credits" to take him beat-- I wish it could be established that Anakin or Padme have some use for a protocol droid. Otherwise, it will stick out as a strange and uncharacteristic beat.
Maybe increasing Artoo's role in this exchange would help -- i.e. they take threepio to help interpret Artoo or otherwise create a more useful arrangement of droids for their mission to save Obi Wan.
Obviously, that's an SOTD issue-- but we seem to need it solved here as well.