Sorry about that, Andy. I hadn't even heard of you when your username was mentioned, and I hope you don't think I was implying you were someone else. Welcome to the boards (belatedly.)
As to color-correcting the 04 DVDs, I couldn't answer that question, because I haven't even seen the '04 DVDs, and have had no opportunity to try. I've seen plenty of screenshots, and they look pretty bad. I can't stand that all the Tantive scenes have blue walls. What's up with that?
I also read somewhere (TF.n, I believe) that the reason the lightsabers appear so dull is because one of the many video processes used to clean up the video treats very bright light as video noise, and mutes it accordingly. This is why I like frame-by-frame fixes whenever possible or feasible, versus simply applying a filter. Lowry was under a tremendous time constrant, so this kind of stuff was allowed to pass through QC.