Anchorhead said:

That's the saddest part of the entire franchise to me - the ever changing original vision and some people's inability to see that there is no such thing. Nor was there ever such a thing, beyond the 1977 theatrical release.

Exactly. Anyone new coming into the franchise, and especially people born after it was created, are only going to believe what they are told, as they have no frame of reference to dispute it. I came into the franchise in 1995. While that meant I could mostly see the revisionist history concerning the prequels and the special editions, I don't think I realized until I came here that, for example, the original Star Wars didn't always say "Episode IV A New Hope." I'd assumed that was always there. My frame of reference was 1995 and the set of interviews that came with the Faces set. So I always just took it as a matter of course what Lucas said in those: that the trilogy was one big movie split into three parts because it was just soooooo damned epic and amazing and long. Since I wasn't there at the time, I had no reason to question it!