I can’t speak for Darth Lucas about the recreation of the 81 crawl, but my purpose has been to recreate what was seen on LD and home video. While the handful of prints of the 81 crawl that have been examined don’t show many stars the LD archived versions do so many many stars at a brightness relative to the following scene. Also, in the version I have been working on (which is not complete due to the difficulty of fixing up the flyover portion of the TN1 35 mm scan included with the SSE 1.0 - for me no other source is acceptable) I am trying to use only components that are true to the 81 crawl. The title fade out is identical to TESB, the crawl is identical to the SE, the stars, moons, and planet have been recovered for the most part by Poita, that just leaves an accurate 1981 flyover. It is different in 77, 81, and the 97 SE so for me only the 81 flyover will work. Darth Lucas has pulled his starfield from TESB - which used the same painted starfield, but not the same shot of it. To properly match the 35mm scan of the 77 crawl, some added grain and a tiny bit of gate weave really make the difference. I’ve had too much on plate to work on the flyover or the improved starfield/moons/planet. To be honest, from the quality of the scan, I am going to have to manually edit ever frame of the flyover (roughly 400) to align each from to a known stable version. Some frames are warped and stretched noticeably.
I admire your dedication and look forward to seeing the finished product. In the version I created, using the '81 crawl with the '77 starfield, I used the “find Edges” effect in After Effects and then several instances of the Paint Bucket Effect to fill the old starfield with blue paint. Then I turned off the find edges effect and keyed out the blue to reveal the new starfield underneath. This worked very well for the crawl, and may also work for the flyover but I never got around to trying it. Give it a go, it may save you a lot of time.