To me, I think Empire looks worse in some ways than Star Wars. The bright snow scenes are very noisy. Star Wars faded a lot but I think the THX process was better able to compensate for that than the flaws in Empire. The smearing is definitely worse on Empire, they definitely overdid it. I have a pre THX '92 vhs tape and some of the scenes which had bad smearing didn't look like they needed that much DVNR at all.
By the way, what does Digitally Mastered really mean? I hope that's not too off topic but I always thought it was a big deal and indicated a good tape transfer without much generation loss. I didn't realize that the telecine was much more important. I knew the THX versions were digitally mastered. The transfer from the master to the GOUT dvd is actually pretty good but the master's quality is very dated. However, my '92 vhs also says Digitally Mastered and some of the older Star Wars from earlier releases have it too. It seems like saying something is digitally mastered today is like boasting a new dvd player has stereo sound capability.