To answer the original question, the 2004 versions are worse overall than the 1997 ones. If for no other reason than the fact that they completely botched the look of the lightsabers. It’s too iconic of a thing to screw up that badly. They were producing the PT films at the time, and rendering pretty great looking lightsabers for those. If they were going to redo the OT sabers concurrently, why make them look like garbage? I think this has recently become among my least favorite changes, up there with Hayden and Jedi Rocks. It’s nice that they fixed about 80% of the saber shots in 2011 despite screwing other things up.

Jedi gets substantially, aggressively worse with each revision. The 97SE would be the least terrible by far, if it were available in decent quality. It’s fairly smooth sailing after the song and dance number (which is the worst part of the trilogy), and the Sarlacc beak.