The demo reel was heavily compressed 720p - even a cleaned up scan of an exhibition print could easily look that good in compressed 720p, so the quality tells us nothing about the source - now I've compared the sabres there with a scan of an I.B. Print and the glows are definitely not the originals, which were much more diffused but the cores actually look very close - both the '97SE and more so the GOUT have the cores blown out and thus looking too fat, so the thickness of the cores in the RMW reel is closer to the original than the GOUT.
Now, the colors in the RMW reel are closer to the way the scene looks in the '97SE broadcasts than on the I.B. print but they look far far better than the 2004 version.
I honestly don't know what to make of this either - Zombie makes some good points about it not being for the 3D release, but I still wouldn't count it out as a possibility - maybe they did do some tests with the 2004 footage and decided, that a remaster was needed for a 3D conversion, because the murky dark 2004 master is completely unfit for a 3D release and as we've learned, the colors and shadow detail can only be salvaged up to a point, so they may have decided that they needed a new master for 3D and today, when you're professionally remastering a high profile film like this from film elements, it would be border-line insane to go any lower than 4K.
Now, they didn't give TPM a 4K remaster but they still did remaster TPM for the 3D release but there's so much 2K CGI in the movie, that they decided to go for the original digital 2K masters instead of scanning film, because the 2K masters would likely have been the source of any complete copy of the movie on film anyway, so by scanning any complete copy of the film at 4K they would basically just be re-digitizing those same 2K files with an added layer of dupe grain and dirt and scratches, only to end up with something that is ultimately still only a 2K to 4K upscale. If they wanted it to look any better, they'd have to re-scan the raw negatives and completely re-do all the VFX, so the film-out masters were the best possible source they had for the completed film. The fact that they then decided to destroy the remaster with DVNR is sad but it also may have something to do with the 3D release - grain just isn't great for 3D.