You are so right about Anakin. That's exactly how his motivation should be captured. Thanks for that.
About Greg Proops: yes. No commentary on the race at all. This isn't fucking Nascar. I want to eliminate as many of the crowd shots as possible and focus on Anakin.
"Removing" R2 is in the sense of eliminating 'his' scene repairing the nubian on exit from Naboo, and is one of a set of edits that need making because Lucas has thrown in spurious 'adventure' elements to the story in numerous places - see also "there's always a bigger fish" and the bongo at the waterfall scene. Handily, all of these happen in the first third, so removing them gets us to Anakin faster anyway.
The crawl needing more balls: yes. Totally. That first crack by me wasn't a serious attempt, btw, just trying to sketch out the kind of information that should appear in it. I'll tackle this again in response to Erikstormtrooper.
A somber ending: yes, that's what I'd like. I'm toying with the idea of having an epilogue crawl in blue to match the credits. Any thoughts?