It was the same with my AOTC edit. So much was cut out that it was just too short. And what was left I thought should have been done differently in the original cut - with no way of fixing it without shooting new scenes with new actors. I had lots of promising editing ideas and was praised for the ones I put into practice with youtube videos, but when you start thinking it'll never be as it should be because of the material you started with, it's a little discouraging.
Of course, someone with the skills and ambition will one day reshoot some significant scenes. Maybe even with key characters - I truly believe that a recast of Anakin is the only way the fans' original vision of the prequels can ever become a reality. It only takes one crazy bastard to reshoot new actors, another to do motion controlled filming on his ship miniatures, and then you have something workable to combine with other people's existing changes to what we already have. All of a sudden we'd have something that isn't just an improvement but is practically an entire new film. Maybe I'm being optimistic. I don't know, but seeing your excellent ideas and thinking about all the others I've seen has just got me thinking that reshot scenes are the one thing missing needed to combine them all together into a cohesive whole. That's why I've always thought a 'round table' style edit, with lots of people on board would be interesting, but a nightmare to coordinate and agree on things.
Edits like yours are good as they get the creative juices flowing. Mine is nowhere near as ambitious on a visual level, and I stated from the beginning that it was more a 'proof of concept' than an edit in its own right, but I was trying absolutely everything I could to implement major plot changes, and I believe there was real potential there to convey something dramatically different to what we started with. It just needed that extra something that I don't have at my disposal - new action scenes and at least one new character reshot with dialogue.
Combine clever editing, with thematic changes through visuals (which it seems you excel at), and you already have a solid base. I've seen first hand that ideas from previous edits are borrowed and tacked on to other people's subsequent edits all the time (I've done it) and this is why even the abandoned or "on-hold" edits (like mine) are still useful. Each new edit we see represents the accumulation of many people's great ideas and concepts. In many ways, it's like a collaboration, only in a more organic way, being added to by different people over time. You could call it evolution if you wanted to be pretentious.
Anyway, this post turned out longer than I planned. :-p It didn't really apply to your project in particular, just fan edits in general and how I see the work that we all do being an invaluable contribution to that final 'definitive' cut where someone has gone the extra mile, along with everyone's previous ideas.
