hairy_hen said:

The thing that interests me most though if I'm honest, is the sound mix for each film in lossless audio and the potential benefits of using the blu-rays to further enhance fanedits.

I'll grant that higher quality source material will certainly increase the potential of fan projects, but having the eff'd up 2004 ANH mix in lossless does no one any good at all. A higher resolution copy of absolute garbage is still absolute garbage, and unlike the image problems there's just no fixing it--it's beyond any salvaging.

I'm not the biggest fan of the '97 SE mix, since it has many unnecessary changes and rather less power than the original 70mm version, but if that was my only option for hearing any version of the movie I'd take it and be glad. It still sounds like Star Wars, unlike the '04 which isn't even remotely recognisable. And whatever even-more-remixed nonsense the Bluray comes up with will probably be even worse.

Well, I agree the messed up sound mix will certainly NOT help - but what do we really know at this point about the sound mix? I can only hope, that they correct the issue with the 2004 mix - at least you'd think they would!

Higher resolution material is still higher resolution material. Working with something that is in higher quality will definitely help on lots of fronts - mainly the colour correcting which is hard to do with the broadcast versions without it causing artefacts due to the limited quality - you can only do so many layers of colour corrections and compressing before you see floaters and other strange artefacts on objects. I think overall it will be slightly easier to work with, but it won't be perfect.