I guess you could say this is the "FACES" release for PAL-land but the covers were different. It had subtitles for the crawl (out of picture) and a French dub. There is another French THX release which has an english track with french subs for the whole film.

I guess 3-PO looking like a lemon is just the contrast of the pre-thx pressing because it looks basically like the DC/FACES releases except with higher resolution. The pre-thx print also has red fading which largely affects his color. Also, vimeo has smoothed both videos out a bit. The pre-thx laserdisc has a LOT of noise in the picture and some scenes have pretty severe chroma issues.

If I were going to do a PAL preservation I'd definitely use the THX release for most of it. I have about 4 or 5 separate pressings of it also which should allow for some good denoising/dropout removal.

Like you said though, the pre-thx laserdisc has things worthy of preserving too such as the original french crawl. I just noticed that it has no episode IV so that's cool. Perhaps the dubbing is different from the Thx release too?