I posted the following paragraph (among much else) to the Foreverness board about a month ago, in answer to a similar question about text differences.

I do think we got Gold and Iron wrong. I supported (indeed helped produce) our current version, but on mature consideration I believe we got sidetracked from the real issue by the peripheral question of whether or not Barch and Komeitk Lelianr get back together. The real question is this: does the book end with Barch, having been marooned by the people he helped to rescue, put his nose to the grindstone and--implicitly--do it all over again or do we get it spelled out? My understanding is that Vance told John Schwab that the entire last chapter was an add-on. He wasn't terribly explicit as to detail 50 years later, but the consensus of the TI team is that, in all likelihood, the publisher accepted the MS on the condition that Jack provide a happy ending--meaning that Barch gets back to Earth AND back together with Komeitk Lelianr (who after all is the mother of his child). Realistically we could not eliminate the entire final chapter (which from internal evidence almost all of us are convinced is from Vance's pen), so I think we should have left it completely alone. Ah well--hindsight is 20-20, and anyway I don't know if anyone on the TI team will agree with me.

Axo's emphasis on the happy ending confirms my point that we missed the real issue, which is the whole last chapter, possibly including a sentence or paragraph or two or three from the preceding chapter. Did the original end with Barch staring in despair at the space where his ship should have been? Did it end with meeting the other escaped slaves from Earth and the resolve to get to work again? Did it end with ships from Earth flying overhead? As I understand it, Jack indicated an affirmative answer to the second question, but without conviction.

Another thing: someone (Axo? David?) correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the U-M edition the only unexpurgated one--i.e., the one containing the child? If that's true, mustn't U-M have created its version from a text more complete than any previously published edition? In other words, mustn't U-M have had an ms from Jack that included the complete final chapter--with the material that Jack therefore approved and that, as I am now convinced, we were wrong to excise?

Sarnidac's point, too, is well taken: we may have decided that Jack eschews sentimentality, but as we so often discovered in producing the VIE, no sooner do you think you have found some pattern in Jack's writing than he gleefully does the exact opposite.

As noted at Foreverness, mine is a minority opinion--quite possibly a minority of one. But the more I think about it, the more I think I'm right.