One thing I remember noticing this time, now that I was watching with a more discerning eye, is that George actually seems to get genuinely annoyed at one point during that conversation he, McCallum and (I think) Burtt are having after getting out of the screening room for that first roughcut. One of the two other guys says something in that slow, trying to say it the nicest he can way and George sort of snaps and goes "yea, yea, yea, I know, this and that" just as the camera cuts away.
Another thing I caught the fuller implication of this time around was how Titanic had not been released when Episode I started shooting, so when they're doing the pickups in Spring of '98 that's why George says "we're never going to beat Titanic" when Frank Oz asks him how well he thinks Episode I is going to do. Also, I didn't notice until this time that George was saying "More American Graffiti" and how it only made 2 cents (or something to that effect).
And, of course, seeing that ending with the Rick McCallum premiere and all the fans screaming upon the cut to the title shot conjured up all kinds of feelings, especially after reading someone's account (I think it was magnoliafan's) of pretty much that same thing happening and the very steep downward decline the rest of the movie after the opening crawl was.
CO, I was thinking the same thing about how Lucas probably went in a different direction than he was going to for eps II and III after all of the TPM backlash, and I echo HotRod's sentiments when I say that AOTC is the true disappointment of the PT. It was nothing but filler to get to Episode III, and even parts of that ended up being filler. The reason I look at TPM differently is that it was only the beginning of the story. Lucas could've gone in any direction he wanted to get from there to Episode IV, and it's the direction he took that disappointed me.