I've struggled with this a bit myself over the years. I compromised a lot on editing my first video in high school, rather than fight with my fellow interns in the edit bay. I finally got my director's cut almost five years later, but I did preserve the original edit.

I had a more thorny problem with a Terminator parody I did in college. The opening shot is a cheesy model of a post apocalyptic building with a airliner sticking out of it. This absolutely killed the comedy for me post 2001, even though it was innocently done 13 years prior. I lucked out in that I still had the camera masters, and found an alternate take of the model where the plane couldn't be seen. I edited that into the video, and problem solved. I did preserve the original though.

On the flip side of the same coin, I finished another video I had to abandon back in college by shooting new linking scenes and effects several years later. The driving force was to parody the Special Editions.

In a perfect world, I would keep adding crap to it every seven years to keep the joke going. ;)