Boris Wrote Let's get one thing straight - I don't care what you do with your edit ... I just don't understand why people think your edit is closer to the OUT than the OUT. We seem to be talking about different things.
You type a lot for someone who doesn't care
For some people the X0 project may be closer to the OUT they saw in cinemas than the GOUT is.
The GOUT is not the cinematic release. It is the home laserdisc version's master tape.
As said before the GOUT's colour is off compared to the film prints, it has DVNR artefacts that were not in the film prints causing a huge loss in detail, and a real distraction in quite a few scenes.
So...
1) A version matched back to film colours and removing those DVNR problems will be closer to what they saw in the cinema than the GOUT is.
That is just plain fact.
And then there are the people that for whatever reason never noticed the mattes, the glitches, the film damage and so forth when they saw it at the cinema. Maybe they were just too engrossed by the film, maybe they were too young or whatever.
For them a cleaned up glitch free version of the film will be closer to the cinematic release.
Now of course we are in the realm of philosophy: is experiencing a film the way you remembered it closer to reality?
Is recreating the experience faithfully more important than recreating the film exactly how it was?
It is going to be different for every single person. For some the ability to get lost in the film the way they did when they first saw it will be the most important thing, and that might mean fixing all the errors so they don't get pulled out of the movie.
You could argue this stuff till the cows come home, so I'm not going to get drawn into it as there is no answer, it is up to each individual.
But if you "just don't understand why people think your edit is closer to the OUT than the OUT" then nothing I can say can make you understand, but you may want to re-read point one.
Answers to your other questions are already in the threads.