Vaderisnothayden said:
The whole thing of mutilating Star Wars with the special edition and replacing the originals with it so the originals may not be available in the future, that's a stab in the heart. That's no minor thing. That's crime against the huge numbers of people who loved the originals.

That pretty much sums it up. I'm probably just repeating what everyone else here has said more eloquently than me... but it just boggles the mind why Lucas seems to loathe the original trilogy so much. He doesn't understand how important the original incarnations are for all of us who saw the OT when they were first released. It's ridiculous that he just can't give those fans a decent release of the films. These are the people who made him rich in the first place. Instead, all he does is throw out a half-assed DVD set, and then pretends that the "modified" versions of the OT are the "real" things. And he'll just keep changing and changing the original movies until they're no longer recognizable. Check out the "Free Hat" episode of South Park. lol.

There are so many other filmmakers out there that respect the fans by making all versions of their films available... Just look at the Blade Runner blu-ray released by Ridley Scott. There are so many versions of that film, and Scott made ALL of them freely available and in decent quality. Lucas, on the other hand, seems to refuse that the original versions of the OT were valid, and he'll never be satisfied with them.