I know George Lucas likes to tote himself as an experimental filmmaker and if you view his early work that is certainly the case but ever since Star Wars he's deliberately become a mainstream one. But i think Star Wars may be in fact his greatest experiment. Its an experiment in constant revisionism--beginning with a film that stands as one thing and slowly metamorphises until its current version is hardly even recognizable as Star Wars. It will be forever incomplete as long as George Lucas is alive. The day the film opened George Lucas was in the MGM recording studio doing ADR recording with Mark Hamill and mixing an improved mono version--i think this anecdote is indicative of the general style in which Lucas takes to Star Wars. Its always changing and it will never be the same film that was released in May 25 1977, in both superficial cosmetic ways and deeper story and character ways. Darth Vader was not Luke's father, Obi Wan didn't duel Luke's father on a volcano, the Sith were common amongst the Imperial ranks, there were multiple Emperors and Leia was just a dasmel in distress. Then all of this was added. Then it became Episode IV of VI. It was recut. Remixed. Our perspective on characters and story changed with the introductions of sequels, prequels and EU.
And as Lucas said himself, one of the main reasons he went back to do the prequels was because it would alter how we viewed the originals. He doesn't want the films to stay the same. And Star Wars hasn't been Star Wars since May 25th 1977. A person viewing it in May 1977, May 1980, May 1990 and May 2010 would each have an entirely different view of the film.
This is Lucas' experiment, and he's far from finished with it.
In this light i actually think its pretty neat because theres never really been a film that has undergone such a process, especially one with a large fan base--naturally people will cling to a particular version of the ever-changing film, be it a certain sound mix or video edit.