The OOT prints exist! Of course they do! LFL did not destroy them. All Lucas said was that the original negative no longers exists. Because it doesn't--it wasn't physically destroyed, as in chucked in a furnace, it was just re-edited, so the negative now is in the edit configuration of the 1997 SE, thus technically you cannot go and make a new print without doing some work to put the O-neg back together the way it was. In any case, they have multiple Interpositives and Internegatives, plus reference prints, and Lucas himself owns a dye-transfer Technicolor print, which he lent to YCM labs as a reference for color since dye-transfer does not fade.

Anyway, my point was that its not necessary to re-edit the O-neg back to its 1977 form because everything is done digitally now anyway. The O-neg was already scanned in 2004, so 95% of the OOT is already in the computer from the original negatives, all you would need to do is get the missing pieces from storage and scan them and edit them into the DI. Which is my point that this is about two days of work with a pricetag of under ten thousand dollars to produce a DI of 1977 Star Wars taken from the original negatives, so cost is not the reason why it is being held back.