Ziz said:

Would that save you from having to do layers upon layers of color balancing from the get-go?

It would, but at the expense of picture quality. I think Adywan would have considered it for that very reason, but while the colours would be better, the other elements of the picture — clarity, resolution and grain, as well as all the SE enhancements he's keeping — would suffer. I believe Adywan's working from the HD broadcast of the 2004 version, making the difference between '04SE and GOUT much much bigger.

I don't know much about the technical aspects of applying the colour histogram from the GOUT to the '04SE; I believe it's been tried but I don't know what the drawbacks are. That's the method I would initially have tried but presumably Adywan has equally good reasons to reject it as well.