What's even stranger, IMO, is that they didn't fix the technical problems with the movies. The snow speeders are still transparent and the Emperor still has little blobs around his eyes, for example.

Agreed. Of course, those two particular things were simply gamma problems in the telecine transfers, and it's possible that they might get fresh transfers for the DVD release. We can hope.

I think it's a stupid move for them not to make the special edition footage optional. The Jabba scene and the Greedo scene sucked so bad...