HAL and I have communicated via private messages and I made sure there were no hard feelings or personal offense taken. I completely agree with every word of what you’ve said about the gratitude fan editors deserve for their work, and I have expressed gratitude to HAL for his wonderful edits.
My comments are primarily motivated by a desire to see these edits be as good as they can possibly be. I can see why you would call my “no excuse” wording “unfortunate”, and I admit I could have made the point less forcefully, but I was never intentionally implying that Cloak of Deception is a bad fan edit or that HAL is a bad editor
I just discovered fan edits for the first time about a week ago so I am new to this scene. I am very happy with the ep I rework that I watched. It’s a huge improvement. And being able to watch ep IV with the mono mix allows me to hear all the sound effects they changed or cut out after 1977. So when I read your post I was like… wow, I hope this doesn’t encourage other people to jump in and get all critical. So I was trying to warn everyone to use kid gloves when discussing fan edits.
Just imagine the cruel and inhumane tribulation Fan Editors will undergo trying to salvage the disaster that is ep VII. How do you un-blowup Hosnian Prime to bring back the Senate? There’s no intergalactic politics, struggle, or credible plot without it. Kylo Ren and Captain Phasma are just plain weak. The Fan Editors will suffer greatly with Disney’s “Strong Brunette Barbie meets Bumbling Ken” singular plot.