Criss has a point, if it was just the money, Lucas would have taken the free offer for a restoration. I remember that offer being made, it was one or more professional restoration guys were willing to do it for little or no money, they just wanted to preserve and restore the Star Wars trilogy and then give it back to Lucasfilm (similar to what Mike ended up doing, except they would have had full access to the best materials to work with).

This is mainly about his ego, which apparently has grown to gigantic proportions over the years. He thinks his changes in the SE, the even more SE (2004) and now the yet *more* SE (2011) are just brilliant. And he's quite annoyed that so many Star Wars fans strongly disagree with him on that, and find at least some of the changes very intrusive, incongruent, silly and in just plain bad taste. So he walked off in a huff and didn't want to play nice any more. But since he didn't have much interest in making more Star Wars movies (likely because the prequels got a rather, shall we say, cool reception among Star Wars fans... plus the general irritation among fans over a lack of the unaltered original trilogy in high quality), he decided to sell the whole thing to Disney. And now that it's no longer his direct responsibility what Disney does, he can distance himself, artistically and creatively speaking, from whatever Disney does in terms of releasing the unaltered original trilogy or whatever garbage they stick in these new movies (and he has a point there...).