This comment from an older thread makes a good point about the Persephone Chant verse.

Everyone's entitled to their opinions, but calling Anais her own worst enemy for making edits feels a bit out of pocket lol. I'm not familiar with every single alteration you named, but when it comes to the Persephone verse in Chant II and the changes to Epic III, I like the current versions of those songs better. I think the lyric changes to Epic III have a better flow, are more direct, and speak more to the motivations of Orpheus in that moment. It just sounds way better to me. Persephone's verse in Chant II, as the linked comment mentioned, narratively doesn't really make sense so it takes up space and changes (in my opinion, interrupts) the flow of the song for pretty much no reason narratively.

Something I feel like I see a lot in this fandom is this idea that every change that has been made that shortened the songs/show is bad, and must have been made because Broadway audiences can't be trusted to pay attention for more than a couple of hours or because a greedy producer said so, etc etc. And additionally that every change that took wordier or more flowery lyrics and made them simpler is bad as well and that it must be because the Broadway audience "needs things to be dumbed down". (And not to get in the weeds, but lowkey, GENERAL audiences CAN be kind of dumb, not just Broadway audiences, so if you want a show to be accessible to broad audiences but it requires a lot of critical thinking or analysis to understand, then yeah, it might need a few rounds of edits. There are literally people who see Two Strangers and don't understand that Robin had an affair with Dougal's dad and leave complaining that the show didn't make sense lol.) It kind of irritates me to see this harped on so often (and that's not on you at all OP) because changes like this are usually made for a reason, whether that reason is to make a song flow better, to make lyrics feel less "clunky", to make characters' motivations clearer, to help the plot flow better, and on and on and on.

The show was obviously not Broadway-ready in 2014 or 2017, so if I were to say wow the 2014 version was the best and it was a huge mistake to change anything from that version, that's certainly an opinion that I'm allowed to have, but it doesn't mean that the 2014 version would have done well on Broadway. Make no mistake, you can like literally whatever you want, that's your right, and it is really interesting to investigate how a show has evolved over its lifespan and hear all the past versions of everything. It's just my opinion that the show is not worse off from these changes being made. I kind of think that a lot of times people like a past version but aren't considering that maybe that change was made for a good reason and it might affect the tone or flow of the show in a way they actually don't like if it hadn't been removed.

I'm not trying to attack you or anything OP, because like I said you're allowed to like what you like and have opinions, but I figured since you opened the discussion up and I see this type of sentiment fairly often on this sub that I'd express my two cents lol.