So after watching (actually skimming, since I'm too busy to really enjoy a full trilogy at the present) Q2's edits, I'm really impressed with how he integrated the two trilogies. He did a very good job of having Anakin die, so we ultimately believe that Vader is the Emperor's next henchman if we were watching the trilogies in numerical order.
However, one thought (which I mentioned elsewhere) still occurs to me: Ben tells Luke, "A young Jedi named Darth Vader, who was a pupil of mine until he turned to evil, helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi knights. He betrayed and murdered your father."
The only pupil we ever see prior to Ben's isolation is Anakin. Any first time watcher of the trilogies, if we've attempted to integrate them as Q2 has, would still be confused. "Well, I saw Anakin die, but Obi-Wan says his apprentice became Vader and killed Anakin." We already see Obi-Wan is a liar of some sort, and part of the surprise is still spoiled or at least in the back of the viewer's mind.
I've got an idea how to fix it: remove a couple of the lines from ANH! But then that doesn't really answer how Anakin died. Ben's still a liar, since we know that he killed Anakin. Plus we lose the impact and personal level of antagonism between Luke and Vader. And furthermore, it creates a bit of an inconsistency with ESB: "Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father." "He told me enough. He told me you killed him." And also there would be this little inconsistency with ROTJ where Luke says, "Obi-Wan. Why didn't you tell me? You told me Vader betrayed and murdered my father," which is almost word-for-word what Ben told Luke in ANH. So I'm not sure how to rectify that problem while preserving as much of the OT as possible. Any other solutions to this problem?
It would be nice if we could see some of the Emperor's other agents somehow involved in the story, and we could speculate which of them was Vader. That way, we'd at least have some room for speculation on who became Vader. Perhaps we could have some inference that one of them was involved in finding Anakin. I dunno, as I think about it, that doesn't work either. Just typing as I think.
A couple of other thoughts have come to me recently, mostly in discussion with others:
Obi-Wan or Ben. Ben says, "I haven't gone by the name of Obi-Wan since, oh, before you were born," to Luke. But even at the end of ROTS he's still going by Obi-Wan. Not a huge problem, and perhaps this is strictly true, since maybe he changed his name immediately when Luke was born. But still, the implication is that he changed it significantly before that. I don't know how many times Obi-Wan is actually said during ROTS, but if it's only a few, is it possible to dub his name there? Or perhaps would that just be a line better removed from ANH?
Yoda, the Jedi Master who instructed Ben. There are two ways I can think of fixing this: remove that little line from ESB, which shouldn't be too big a deal: "There you will learn from Yoda, the Jedi Master." I think there's even enough of a pause for it to be a believable end of the sentence. The other is something that Pagz did at FE.org. I know his edit was seen as too rough, and some of his ideas weren't well-received, but he really had many interesting ideas, including how to handle this problem. In his opening crawl he has this:
Jedi Knight Qui-Gon Jinn, overseeing young Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi's trials of knighthood, has been dispatched to liberate Alderaan from the tyranny of the Federation and to restore freedom to the peaceful system....
He turns Naboo into Alderaan, so don't let that distract you. But he has Qui-Gon not serve as Obi-Wan's master, but rather as his preceptor or final trainer. I think that serves as a reasonable explanation.
To read more about his edit, go here:
http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Star-Wars-The-Vader-Confidential-Edits-Episode-I-Completed-and-Available/topic/12302/