cutnshut said:

Princess - regardless who wrote it, the scene can still be removed without destroying the movie - therefore i find it hard to believe that this idea was originally the main plot of the movie.

But... that's not at all what we're talking about in this thread. I'm sure there are lots of scenes from any Star Wars movie I could remove and have it make sense or even improve it (Jabba the Hutt stuff, I'm looking at you). But we're analyzing what's there, not what we'd prefer to be there, not what could have been there, not what wasn't there, and not what we think Lucas had or hadn't come up with at that point.