From what i remember the original emperor was more of a combination of Richard Nixon and the Wizard of Oz.
The man behind the curtain who you never actually see but people speak of him with awe and fear.
I must say the description used by Alan Dean Foster in the 1976-77 novel happens to sound an awful lot like the emperor of Frank Herberts Dune.
And if that was not intentional on the part of Lucas then it probably is foster's own addition. Perhaps he is a fan of the novel dune?
Even in The Empire Strikes Back the emperor as he appears to be mysterious and dissembodied like a ghostly apparition.
As played by Clive Revill he was a much more powerful character becuase he was literally like in the original novel the unseen imperial voice, he sends his personal agents like vader to do his bidding.
In fact at one point the sith were the emperor's bodyguards as well as assassins in the script.
In rotj the emperor becomes more human even if slighly grotesque and satanic.
Lucas has not a single original idea the imperial world is actually taken from the novels of isaac asimov's empire trilogy and its sequel foundation trilogy. There it is called Trantor. Also there is a rebel world in his novels called Korell. LOL
The jedi are one part kurosawa samurai and another part lensman of the galactic patrol. Who are not answerable to anyone and are judge jury and excecutioner as they see fit.
Very few people have ever seen let alone had access to the 9 film outline. All we have is second hand info from People like Gary Kurtz that cannot really be taken on face value as evidance when he seems to think he knows star wars better than its actual author does.
Did the guy who wrote the annotated screenplays actually have access to the story outlines. How about Rinzler?
All the evidance seems to suggest all we have are prototype scripts and outlines and discarded ideas for a new hope that had been re-used for the prequels. and that no outlines actually exist for the prequels before he put pencil to paper in 1994. Never mind the sequel trilogy outline the biggest urban star wars myth of all.
It has never been a secret that both Luke and Anakin stem from a character called anakin starkiller in the rough draft script, and that both are actually the same prototype character in essence except one chosen to go over to the darkside and the other does not. Vader is Luke's shadow self or dark half. Which is pretty obvious after seeing the dual in the dagobah cave.
One of lucas favorite concepts is yin and yang, so he had kenobi the good father and vader the bad father etc.