In interviews with Lucas he talked about an early cut with the Biggs scenes and said that his reason for deleting them was that he preferred the presentation being:
The audience meets the robots & Leia.
Robots take you to Luke
The robots & Luke takes you to Ben
The robots, Luke & Ben take you to Han & Chewie
The robots, Luke, Ben, Han & Chewie take you back to Leia
He also felt (if I recall reading correctly) that having Luke in the beginning was adding too many characters to keep track of.
Personally, I would love to see them restore the scenes and re-integrate them. I think it is Building Star Wars that restores them in sequence (or maybe Behind the Magic). I don't think that the audience would have a hard time keeping track of who is who - Robert Altmann has made a career out of movies featuring ensemble casts (MASH, Nashville, Short Cuts, The Player, Gosford Park....heck, a bad Altmann movie is better than most of the dreck that comes out every week these days).
One of the great things for me being a 12 year old watching the original movie was that the robots talked and they didn't subtitle it. Chewie talks and they didn't subtitle it. The jawas talked and they didn't subtitle it. But the audience understood what they were saying. Treat the audience like they are smart and they will rise to the occasion.
The main weakness of the prequel trilogy is that they are all foreground and no background. I love the Adigitalman edits of 1, 2 & 3 that do nothing more than add the deleted scenes back in. Anyone else notice that a lot of the deleted scenes are mostly exposition, backstory and character development? I watched 4 & 5 as a kid and was riveted to every scene, whether there was a shoot out or Ben was telling Luke about his dad. Then again, my pet theory about part of the appeal of the first movie at the time was that there was a generation of kids from the explosion in the divorce rate in the 70's and these kids didn't know their dads like other ones did and when Luke said, tell me about my father, these kids in the audience knew where he was coming from. I don't think that part of the movie was intended, but it was certainly fortuitous timing.