I agree... the Neimoidian voices aren't that big a deal in the end, if you cut out about half their dialogue. For example, you don't need "are you brain dead?". "I'm not going in there with two Jedi" gets all the information you need across. That's pretty much the rule with these movies though: make everyone talk about half as much and a whole host of ills are cured.

Paulisdead... that revised opening sounds interesting, but Jar Jar is all up in that scene when the Jedi jump down and rescue the queen. I just don't see how it would feel right to have him hanging around with no real introduction. I know there's the scene where Padme cleans R2, but that's still a weird intro for JJ, and it happens to be one of the most useless, poorly ended scenes in TPM. But that's all personal opinion, of course.

I had ideas about enlisting a colleague to change the pan down after the crawl so it panned directly to the droid control ship in that shot that begins the invasion... then basically you'd have the queen waiting for their arrival and the Jedi arriving at the last minute to intervene. I couldn't quite make it work, however. The structure, that is. I think we could have pulled off the new pan.