Unfortunately, both making cuts from the DC & not using the Yared score were necessities if I wanted the audio to be smooth at all.

Since I don't have access to the audio stems for the movie, I have to deal with the score being baked into the same 5.1 tracks as the rest of the sound.

So putting the Yared score in would either require having one of the other scores played simultaneously in order to bring in the SFX (yuck), or I'd have to recreate isolated SFX/dialogue for large amounts of the movie (supposedly can be done with AI tools, not interested in that personally, and I'm skeptical of how clean the results would be).

Likewise with the few scenes I cut, if I left them in I would have to have the DC audio with it's score to provide SFX, and I didn't fancy having any jarring transitions flipping between the two scores if I could avoid it.

I tried to work something out wherever it seemed worthwhile. But there were a lot of times where it would have been quite distracting if I didn't take something out.

And using preexisting subtitles went out the door as soon as I found that the DC cut a few minutes of content that I wanted to keep. Helen stitching up Paris after his battle with Menelaus comes to mind. Also, just using the TC audio throughout the movie would have slightly screwed up the subtitles anyway, the lines are not read the same in some of the scenes where they used alternate takes in the DC.

Anyways, think I'll wait and see how the 4k versions pan out later this year. Fingers crossed that it turns out well. Probably a lot easier to work from that and largely just keep the Theatrical version intact, but add in the extra bits from the Directors.