Or they’re working on a restoration but had other priorities (rebooting the series); ran into snags; waiting for the anniversary, etc. Could be anything, or what you suggested. The distributors cut though is so small I’d think it’d be better for Disney to release it before IX is released while interest is still higher and sales could be maximized.
Now that I did the math, I highly doubt that Disney wouldn’t care about an HD OUT release.
I combined all the views that Marcelo’s comparison videos and Harmys despecialized videos got and the grand total
was 84,062,000 views. With all that’s happened with Disney and FOX and George Lucas, the idea of an OUT HD restoration
not coming to Blu-Ray seems highly unlikely to me.
I dunno, to me, there are to many views on those videos for Disney to ignore. The demand is clearly there.