Welcome, Stale Elvis! I'll echo Luke, and hope that Jimbo doesn't scare you away. I've spent more time reading the TFN boards than I care to think about, and I'm really fed up with the pro-Lucas talk you come across in every place where they discuss the original trilogy. I'm thinking of leaving the Classic Trilogy section for good and start posting somewhere where the posters are simply trying to have fun discussing the stories and the entire universe. I wonder if Lucas understands how much of a rift he's created in the Star Wars community, and even if he does, I'm sure he doesn't care.
I agree with you completely. If you have a copy of 1977's The Making of Star Wars, sit down and watch it sometime. It was made without hindsight, and gives you a feeling of what the original sentiments of Lucas and others were at the very beginning. You also get a sense of just how resourceful the effects people had to be with the technology they had at the time. The cinematic miracles they managed to achieve are now being erased, one special edition at a time, however. I know one of the effects that Lucas complained most about in ANH was the vasoline smudge under Luke's landspeeder, and yet I find that it was a creative solution to a problem, and it worked. It took more creativity and originality to think up the concept and say, 'Hey, why don't we smudge it out with vasoline?' then to say, 'Ah, hell, don't worry about the undercarriage of the landspeeder. We'll just take it out on the computer.' Do I hate the Special Editions? No, but I do hate that the dedication of the original crew members on the set of the movies are having their hard work wiped from the record.

By the way, Jimbo, some people actually feel Return of the Jedi is the best of the movies. If you want people to respect your opinion of AOTC being a masterpiece, don't slam ROTJ. Each of these films is someone's favorite in the saga, after all.