There was no reason for an NTSC owner to really want PAL capability back then either, their TVs wouldn't cope with it and there were very very very few titles that got a true PAL release anyway.
Making the X0 player do PAL would have cost a fortune in engineering, and had no real market. It just didn't make financial sense.
BTW I was reading that Lucas interview just now and saw this:
GL: These films are incredibly difficult to make. Normally, a director is concerned mainly with character and with telling a story. In the Star Wars films that is important, but equally important are all the details. They’re like little time bombs all over the set, thousands of them, and if you don't catch one it could do you in. When the shot moves around and there's some little thing that isn't right, it could take the audience completely out of the movie. In a normal film there isn't that thin edge. Reality, the reality of the world we know, is a tangible presence in most films. The viewer is there, it's real. But in a film like this, where we're creating a world that doesn't exist, it's very easy to puncture a viewer’s sense of reality by a missing or wrong detail.
Pretty much sums up why a glitch free preservation is important to me.
Thanks for the comments Ghostalpha, it isn't really a case of justifying myself, just letting people know what makes me tick.
The other unmentioned result I wanted from the X0 project was to inspire other people to have a go, and share some techniques. People that play with this sort of thing may end up getting interested as a career option or at the least learn some stuff and then contribute back into the community again.