OK, I grabbed a new screenshot from the TWC326 version of the cropped, mono mix bootleg. I used VLC to correct the hue, decreas the saturation a little, and very slightly sharpen it.

Not much better. The planet still looks like a blob of color. Still, my hunch is that this is the cloudless composite.

Also, the guy with the cat-face emoticon showed me the version of the scene that appears on the French pre-THX "pyramid" laserdisc box set.

As you can see, it's cloudless.

LDDB says this release is from 1994, and the packaging resembles the U.S. Definitive Collection, but the LDDB pages for the single-film 1994 discs say they're improved pressings of the same masters as the earlier French letterbox discs. So that would mean this transfer dates back to 1989.

I wonder if anyone has the original '89 French LBX LD, to definitively confirm whether that version has the cloudless composite too. (It would also be nice to see the German pre-THX LDs as well.)

EDIT: Andrea also told me that the French Pyramid LD doesn't have the Tantive burn marks. So apparently, this film source had no burn marks AND no clouds, as well as having the Greedo subtitles (since they had to switch to a different, vastly inferior print for the clean Greedo scene - go figure, the JSC already had it clean and it didn't look like a dark, purple-tinted mess).

It just gets more confusing...