TServo: yes, 100% in the original Star Wars it was blue throughout. It's true that the color varied just a touch - I mean, even "blue" is actually a sort of light blue, but not cyan, for sure. And though the saturation dipped a touch during the training remote sequence, it's absolutely fringed blue, no doubt.
About the '97: I have, over the years, seen several '97 prints in varying stages of quality; however, they all exhibited the same base color characteristics. In every print I've seen, everything from the washed-out color palette to the green lightsaber was present. Now, is it possible that every '97 I saw just happened to be defective in the same way; just happened to match each other, but that there were '97 prints which looked like Tech prints do? Geez, I guess? But...
In my opinion, the one advantage a '97 would have over a Tech print would be that it has slightly less inherent contrast, which can kill mid-shadow details and mid-high details. So, my theoretical "perfect source" would actually be a combination of both.
...and you have to remember that no print stock has the range that negative stock does. Technically speaking, it isn't possible to truly capture the negative on print. It's always a compromise in one way or another, biased however the stock itself is biased. That's the "downside" of photochemical processes. I mean, no two prints on the same stock even look 100% identical.
So the REAL goal would be a sort of "reclaim the negative" approach, which digital tools allow us to do. To do this, you'd want to scan a variety of prints at a couple exposures, allowing for the first time the subtlest of details in highs and lows to both be present in the image for the first time since the negative. Any definitive restoration would need multiple prints as sources in the first place, so why not go that extra level? One print might be good for color fidelity, but be uncharacteristically grainy. Another one might be super sharp and low-grain but have horrible color. Digital tools allow us to take the best of all worlds and rebuild an ideal image. Then, if you had a truly trustworthy color source to keep everything referenced to, you could produce a truly definitive Star Wars, which was arguably what was always intended - what was on the negative - but never previously possible to realize.
_Mike