Son of a biiiiiitch.
The only fix I can see is cropping the video to hide the timecode. It would look ridiculous, but that is the only thing I could even think of to resolve it.
Yep. We will see how some of the scenes that could be important, plot wise, look and work when cropped. Their inclusion would be more about dialogue and material rather than the visual. But as far as including scenes just for being cool (snowspeeder, etc), I think they might be passed over until better material shows up.
Not sure they did it to screw with us. Lots of studios include crap like this for some reason. But it could indeed be to prevent bootleg discs with ‘extended versions’ from showing up in countries where that kind of thing is prevalent and can compete with real releases.