True enough, they did a great job with what they had to work with.

Have a great memory of watching old VHS SW and commenting that "this was way ahead of its time"

chyron - understandable. I've certainly got bits of memory like that, where one thing or another seems different or odd to me.
Probably saw the 80's VHS copies so many times as a kid that it's the version I specifically remember the best. Getting the SE VHS set in '97/'98 was nifty, but all the changes were just odd (edit: by "odd" I mean fucked up beyond repair, esp. the ROTJ Jabba scene with a pathetic excuse for 'music,' the Ewok song being re-written terribly, Empire having a bunch of weird additional scenes, and "A New Hope" having tons of awkward changes...).

In many areas, however, they seem to have not screwed up the colors as badly as the later DVD set that I got ('06). Swore I'd never get another edition, until the originals were published on DVD, which I did finally buy when they came out. The crushed blacks, weird color choices were just absolutely horrible though. When I first played those SE discs, I thought my setup was somehow broken, that Macrovision had been accidentally triggered, or that my TV was dying. I tried again one other time to watch the '04 DVD set (silver box) that a girlfriend had, and it was also beyond hope to tweak the LCD being used at that time to make it look even halfway watchable.