“Because it makes good business sense” has been a valid argument since 1997. If anything, that argument is actually becoming less valid as time goes on, as the proportion of the Star Wars fanbase that has actually seen the Star Wars trilogy that started it all decreases.
It will always make good business sense. There always has been and always will be a market for the unaltered films. Things we infinitely smaller followings have received releases in the past. The producer’s cut of Halloween 6 was released on bluray recently as the selling point for the Halloween box set, and in 2013 the original mixes of ZZ Top’s studio albums were released on CD for the first time since before they had been altered with new percussion in the late 1980s. There really is a market for almost everything, but especially Star Wars. Despecialized Edition has proven that there is a market for the OT. Whether the fact that there is money to be made will motivate Lucasfilm to them releasing the films is yet to be seen, however.
Not sure we’re in disagreement. The original ZZ Top mixes may still have a market now, but it would have made more business sense to do it twenty years ago. If they held out another fifty years, would it have still made business sense then? I think our different attitudes come from our differing expectations of an official OOT release. If I’m reading you correctly, you seem to think it could happen in 5-10 years, while I tend to think the most likely official OOT release scenario is for the OOT copyrights to expire (still a hundred years out or more), so that some public domain media outfit like Laserlight will release it as a cheapo vintage classics collection. The length of the wait does impact the size of the audience, if the wait is long enough. I’m not saying an OOT release won’t make business sense even then, just that it’ll make considerably less sense than it would have a century earlier.