zombie84 said:

... The issue of "preserving the OOT" didn't exist, because the SE was brand new and available in VHS (LD was obsolete by then) so the versions were totally equal, and there were still a ton of the Faces tapes in stores.

Laserdisc might have been on the way out, but was by no means obsolete; and the SE was released on LD in 1997.

The format was almost dead in 2000, but The Phantom Menace still got a LD release in Japan that year.

Incidentally, even though the 2001 DVD release of TPM looked like shit, it still achieved record sales in the US.