I've been going back and comparing L8wrtr's Sith reveal vs Kerr's Sith reveal, and the problem with L8wrtr's lies how the lighting is handled.

In L8wrtr's edit, the lights are flickering in and out, and it's very obvious that he could only have made the "reveal" off camera.

Stankpac's most recent update to his edit, as I recall, adds loud heartbeats with too much LFE, and a very loud thunderclap, which is very distracting.

Kerr, whose idea this was originally anyway, has the lights flicker and go out. When Palpatine electrocutes armless-Windu, he apppears normal ("power!); the lights flicker and go out completely ("unlimited..."); and when they come back up ("POWER!") he is wrinkly. Very barely when the lights are out can you make out that he is perhaps already wrinkly, but it's hard to tell exactly. The sequence is very, very well done.

(Unfortunately, this scene alone doesn't win me over with Kerr's edit, as the edit overall does have other technical problems.)

So, I suppose what this means is that a Sith-form reveal by Palpatine can indeed be believable and sensical. It just has to be edited properly.