brash_stryker said:

A more apt comparison would be the original pubication of The Hobbit. Once Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings, he realised that the Gollum scene undermined what Smeagol was all about in the saga, so he 'revisited' it, altering the scene so that Bilbo escapes Gollum under different circumstances.

Of course, it's not a great comparison, really, because that was a change the fans could live with, and actually improved upon the characterisations and forming a cohesive whole with the other books. The changes in these Blu Ray don't do anything but undermine existing emotional tones and piss people off.

You can still read the emended material in The Annotated Hobbit. The original material is reproduced there perfectly, letter-for-letter. A Tolkien fan editor could use this to reproduce the text of the Hobbit with no guess-work, substitution, or insertions from inferior copies. You can also find a first edition of The Hobbit with a little work, which of course perfectly preserves the original text and art. If it's printed on good paper and stored properly, the original Hobbit will survive for centuries, in the most successful and accessible format in history. It is in no danger of being lost or obsoleted.

Star Wars is in a slightly different place. A perfect reproduction would have to be struck from pre-Special Edition film elements. We don't have access to those. We do have home video versions, but they all have well-known defects, or at least shortcomings. We can't say with much confidence that Star Wars will be perfectly preserved for centuries to come. Reconstructions of it? Sure. Low-res official copies? Maybe. A perfect witness to the original? I don't know.