Hello and welcome, cdbarnes!
Your post sent me on a trip down memory lane, back to the 56K dial-up days seeing those first photos from the set of Episode I on the official website (a full-sized AAT sitting around what must've been the backlot at Leavesden, Jake Lloyd as Anakin at the dinner table in the slave quarters, Ewan McGregor as a buzz-cut Obi-Wan, etc). Oh, and there was that Doug Chiang sketch of the Naboo N-1 if I remember correctly....
Then there was that first teaser trailer in November of '98, wow. It'd been almost two years since the SE's were in theaters, and I think somewhere in the back of my head I saw the dewbacks and rontos, the updated lucasfilm logo and thought "yup, the SE's are gonna be considered the official versions now, to match up with all the cgi of this new prequel trilogy."
I still never, ever in a million years would've expected something as lame as the GOUT from a company like Lucasfilm. That was what finally made me wish the SE's had never happened and that we'd gotten a less effects-intensive trilogy of prequels (made in as close a way as possible to the OOT, which we'd now just be calling the OT) from three new directors, with Lucas simply writing the story as he did on Empire.
But, that ship has sailed.
There are things about the SE's and the prequels that I like, and zombie's "Secret History of Star Wars" finally allowed me to take a step back and see these movies for what they are.
I'd actually love it if Lucasfilm released the theatrical cuts of all six movies. I think Revenge of the Sith is the only one to make it to blu-ray in its original form (even the dvd had that wipe switched with a cut). TPM was substantially altered from the dvd onward, as was AOTC.
Something I've been vocal about on this site is the small alterations that slip under the radar when a movie gets "restored." The Wizard of Oz's most recent restoration is not a true one. Wires were digitally erased in at least one shot, with the justification that "audiences in 1939 would've never seen the wires since they weren't looking at a direct scan of the negative like we are today."
The thing is, I still hate that justification. Just because audiences didn't see it doesn't mean it wasn't there. There was a restoration/remastering done only four years earlier for a special dvd edition which left the wires in. That one was finished at 1080p, so hopefully there's an hd broadcast of it floating around the internet somewhere.
All of this is to say, alterations are a slippery slope IMO. James Cameron went crazy "correcting" Titanic for its most recent release, erasing things that would've been clearly visible to audiences in '97/'98, and that's an erasure of film history. But the prevailing attitude these days is that the director, if given the power, gets to make that call.
The work done by Charlie de Lauzirika and Warner Bros for Blade Runner's 25th anniversary remains the standard by which all archival releases should be judged. I've long said of a hypothetical ultimate release of the Star Wars films that, at the very least, all theatrically-released versions should be included. This would mean the original, the '97 and the inevitable 3D I'm sure they'll force us to buy in order to get the original and the '97 ;)
For the prequels, this would obviously mean the theatrical cut of TPM and either of the theatrical cuts of AotC (neither of which are the version on the dvd, which extended the scene where Anakin confesses to Padme about the Tusken slaughter). Also, give us the Imax cut of AotC!
So, yeah, this post got away from me.
I'll just wrap up by saying that I've yet to see The Phantom Edit, even after hearing about it for all these years.
I'll have to rectify that sometime soon.