Welcome, S_Matt!

Excellent post, I completely agree on the ways that the SE's detract from the movie experience that used to be just right. Changing the originals to 'fit' with the prequels was a very bad idea, and with all his retconning the story loses even more coherence every time. As you say, the CGI inserts are very distracting and unnecessary and call attention to themselves and their own shortcomings far more than any of the limitations present originally.

If you get a chance, I recommend checking out dark_jedi's version 3 dvd releases. These are the result of a collaborative effort from many forum members and present a significant improvement on the official retail versions, most notably by resizing the image to 16:9, stabilising the image shake, smoothing out jagged edges, giving reasonable strengthening to the gamma and saturation, recreating the original subtitles; and perhaps most significantly, providing many audio options, including the theatrical stereo and mono mixes, 5.1 mixes approximating the 70mm versions, and isolated score tracks. If you find the retail dvd's satisfactory, you'll love these, because they are similar and yet so much better. :)