As for Close Encounters, I honestly know nothing about the new transfer and haven't even seen it. But the whole Lowry thing was just to clean up dirt and scratches, and Star Wars was particularly abused--there are many other methods for dirt removal other than Lowry. See Criterion's work, or the archival Blade Runner cuts. You don't need Lowry to make your films look good, and in fact I'd say the SW SE looks a bit too clean. The issues with the unstable film stock really relate to color issues--certain color layers begin fading at differing rates, so you get shots tinted blue or red (most commonly--the yellow layer is particularly unstable). All this requires is color manipulation, basically an advanced version of photoshop, so its not a big deal. At a certain point the colors fade to the point where theres nothing to recover--The Searchers, in particular, is plagued with this problem--but Lowry doesn't have anything to do with the coloring anyway, they are purely a dirt-removal thing.
As for Close Encounters, I honestly know nothing about the new transfer and haven't even seen it. But the whole Lowry thing was just to clean up dirt and scratches, and Star Wars was particularly abused--there are many other methods for dirt removal other than Lowry. See Criterion's work, or the archival Blade Runner cuts. You don't need Lowry to make your films look good, and in fact I'd say the SW SE looks a bit too clean. The issues with the unstable film stock really relate to color issues--certain color layers begin fading at differing rates, so you get shots tinted blue or red (most commonly--the yellow layer is particularly unstable). All this requires is color manipulation, basically an advanced version of photoshop, so its not a big deal. At a certain point the colors fade to the point where theres nothing to recover--The Searchers, in particular, is plagued with this problem--but Lowry doesn't have anything to do with the coloring anyway, they are purely a dirt-removal thing.