All right. If someone has addressed this before, I apologize for fobbing this off as original thought. To the best of my knowledge, this hasn't been discussed before in any SW forum I've been to.
ESB: Vader wants Luke Skywalker desparately. He is using a ton of Imperial resources to track down this one guy. (Of course, we do not yet know about their blood ties) True, finding Skywalker means finding the Rebels, but the course of the movie makes clear that finding the Rebel base is the second bird - Vader's one stone is aimed at Luke. (If that weren't the case, why did not Vader's ship try to follow the Rebel fleet out of Hoth instead of the Millennium Falcon?)
Boba Fett tracks down the Falcon in Vader's employ, and Vader captures Han and company simply to lure Luke to Bespin. Vader only freezes Han to see if it will work on Luke. When Vader is done with Leia and Chewie, he decides...to just leave them behind on Bespin. Sure, they can't leave Cloud City, but he can't be bothered to take two highly decorated heroes of the Rebellion captive. No, he captured Leia once - it's quite enough. In fact, Vader doesn't taunt the Princess as he once did on the Tantive IV - he doesn't even spare a single word for her. Only later does the incredibly powerful and shrewd Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith, change his mind. "Yeah, I guess I'd better take the girl and the Wookiee slave with me, Palp will be probably get mad at me if I don't." But Vader doesn't feel anything for having captured two key Rebels - all they were to him was LukeBait!
Fast forward...
ROTJ: There is no reason to believe that Darth Vader doesn't still want Luke to join him, right? ESB established, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that Vader wanted to partner up with junior and take over the galaxy. Vader has shown that he will use Luke's friends as bait to snare him. Vader has worked with Boba Fett before, and lo and behold, Fett is on Tattooine when ROTJ starts, and he can see for himself that all of Luke's closest friends, all important Rebels, are inside Jabba's palace. Vader knows good and well where Tattooine is. I presume Fett has to have Darth Vader on speed-dial -
SO WHY THE HELL IS VADER NOT IN JABBA'S PALACE WAITING ON LUKE?!? HOW INCREDIBLY, STUPIDLY, MIND-BLOWINGLY INCONSISTENT TO ESTABLISH DARTH VADER AS SOME SORT OF MASTER OF FORCE-POWERED DEDUCTIVE REASONING ("That's it. The Rebels are there!") WITH A HUGE BONER FOR LUKE'S FORCE POWERS IN ONE MOVIE, THEN IN THE NEXT MOVIE, WHEN THE PLOT CONVENIENTLY GETS ALL OF LUKE'S FRIENDS (LukeBait) TOGETHER ON ONE PLANET, A PLANET VADER KNOWS QUITE A LOT ABOUT BY THE WAY, HE'S NOT SITTING AT THE HEAD OF A DINING ROOM TABLE???
There is no room for debate here, ladies and gentlemen. The much-discussed Han rescue sequence, broken down brilliantly by Gaffer Tape, wouldn't have happened at all had the Darth Vader of ESB appeared in ROTJ. What, was the kinder, gentler Vader of ROTJ just giving Luke his personal space? Letting him "find himself"?
My personal SW universe is starting to exclude movies made after 1977.