He looks at the movies differently than we do. To him, he always rememembers the process, what went wrong and what he missed. Except for the hard-core behind-the-scene Comic Book Guy junkies, we see the finished product, what we've been watching and what captivated us for many years. A totally different viewpoint.
Pardon a jazz analogy, but Lucas could learn a thing or two from Miles Davis (though about this 'cause I've been completing my Miles Davis collection). A lot of his music was divisive and controversial, but it was because for much of his career he was only interested in moving forward. He said in an interview late in his career that he wouldn't play stuff from Kind of Blue (the most successful and popular jazz LP of all time) because those songs were from that moment and now he's on to other things- they were dead to him, he couldn't listen to anything from his past.
Lucas dwells on his previous glories: not just fixing the old movies, but making new ones. And look what happens as a result: the new ones suck, the old ones kinda suck and we can't get the real thing on DVD. And we know he's a talented filmmaker- wouldn't it have been better if he adopted the true artist's attitude of looking forward and worked on new stuff? Or at least dissappear and let us celebrate his glory days instead of Naderising his life.
I'm never one to declare something great as "ruined" (ie, Metallica's crappy music of the past dozen years dozen "ruin" their classic output), but Star Wars is dead to me now. I don't have laserdisc and I don't watch VHS anymore, and I'm not going to make exceptions for any movie 'cause some bearded twit doesn't understand his own films.
