Of course it needed to be made: most theatres were still lo-fi Academy mono systems, and playing back a matrixed stereo track this way isn't quite ideal. But there's a difference between that and doing it over again from scratch and changing lots of things that didn't need to be changed. Honestly, I think they could have derived most of the mono version from the existing 4-track master and just tweaked it a bit for the format rather than going back to the beginning when it was already right to start with. Seriously, the difference in balance is not subtle.

Of course there is always the temptation to go back and revisit existing work. I've been doing that myself with the 70mm recreation. Perhaps that is justified since it's coming out more accurate to the original this time, though the LFE channel still represents an educated guess of what it sounded like rather than absolute certainty. But it's very important to be able to recognise what works and ought not to be changed, and exercise restraint accordingly.

And since this thread is about Harmy's project rather than audio tracks, I shall say no more about it. Later on I'll post some more observations about the colour of the workprint, which for the most part is really fantastic.