To be fair he’s not “correcting” anything that is a direct result of the photography and compositing. He explained that his fixing the registration issues on the Death Star approach is because it’s impossible to tell which registration issues happened during the original compositing and which ones happened further down the line at a different stage, so just to be safe, he corrected all of them.
It’s still the original elements. It’s still the original matte lines and all of the evidence of 1976-77 compositing techniques.
The only thing he’s done that I don’t necessarily agree with is his recreating of the crawl. The degradation of the crawl as it recedes is a product of the processes of the day, and I think it should stay, but overall, that’s the only thing he’s done I have a problem with, and it’s something I can live with.
He’s doing a far more pure, honest, and respectful restoration than anyone in Hollywood right now. We are perhaps too scrutinous of work done to this film because it means so much to us and we take ownership of it. To the point where we nitpick stuff like this, even when it’s the best, most pure restoration we’ve gotten of just about any film, not just a Star Wars film.
Plus, it’s not like it would be hard to digitally add extra layers of grain on top of it to simulate the grain that would be present on a 35mm print in 77, if that’s what you really want.