More comments from the peanut gallery
First off thanks again for sharing this with the community. When watching this it made me remember why I loved Star Wars when I was growing up.
Things that worked really well: vader/obi duel (nice in intensity but not over the top), the cantina critters, the DS battle for the most part, as well as the new HUDs and other displays/schematics. All the changes tended to be nice and subtle.
As for constuctive crits:
I agree with some of the other folks that the severed hand needs some work because at first I didn't quite get what you were going for until I replayed it in slow motion. Right now it kind of looks like a dark plastic mitten.. The hand although hairy is much easier to identify with for the audience.
I absolutely loved the DS sequence except for the TIE reveal because it completely messes up with the pacing. You start out with a super frantic firefight which I think is fantastic, but then its slowed down by the slow reveal of the tie fighters and the introduction of the imperial march. Since you include the imperial march you had to reuse some reaction shots of pilots as fill-in footage to match musical cues. Once you got back to the original soundtrack, pacing picked up again. It might be better if you keep the original soundtrack in and just have the tie reveal in the same amount of time. The final DS explosion seems a little weak compared to the new beefier Alderan explosion.
But even so the entire film as a whole is pretty close to what I wanted of the special editions so congrats and thanks again.
-kid