Darth Lars said:

I agree. The transports need to be further up in the picture, or the men in the left side of the picture need to be removed. The relationship between those men and the men in the foreground sets a scale that clashes with the scale between the foreground and the starship. There is no way to convince me that the starships are located at a lower elevation than the pilots.

The transports are not at a lower elevation. They are at the same elevation, but a few hundred meters away in the background, sitting on the ground. I do not see anything wrong with the scale, personally.

Darth Lars said:

A background element should never have better focus than the foreground.

You can find many, many examples in cinema where the background is in focus while the foreground is not, or the background is equally in focus as the foreground. It has to do with depth of field and focal length, if I'm not mistaken. Akira Kurosawa, for example, was famous for positioning his camera far from the action and shooting with a telephoto lens to flatten the depth of field. This brought background elements right up against the foreground elements, creating almost a 2-dimensional effect. With the right positioning and focal length, a person in the background can be made to look larger than a person in the foreground. Cinematographers use a variety of such tricks to create or eliminate depth in a scene.