Avengers: Extended Edition, The

I absolutely loved this edit, I think the film has a better flow with the alternate opening and closing scenes with Maria Hill. Sam has restored just about as much as he physically could without compromising the use of unfinished scenes and the result is fantastic. Ashley Johnson's waitress has a fair bit more screen time now though it does seem a little out of place given she is quiet for the majority of it, but I love Ashley Johnson and the news interview at the end lets Cap'n have a nice bit of recognition.

if my enjoyment of the theatrical cut was 8/10 this definitely bumps it up to a 9.5

I loved this edit. The deleted material was put back in seamlessly. If I hadn't seen the theatrical cut way too many times I would not have known what was added. I watched this with my wife and kid and they had no idea this was a fan edit. Great job all around.

This is the closest thing to an extended director's cut of The Avengers you'll ever get; while not all the deleted scenes are necessary, it's nice to see them flawlessly integrated (Stan Lee now has a double cameo and it's finally explained the focus of the theatrical version on the waitress, which honestly should've remained in the final version).
Overall, it's a solid work and a good alternative to one of the greatest superheroes movies of all time.

While I really liked the beginning of the edit with Hill at first, I kind of missed the original intro, and felt like this compromised the ending a bit, which in my opinion wasn't really seamless, especially when compared to the original.

Some of the added scenes were pretty great and IMO necessary additions, but some of them weren't really as great: The Hulk scene with the security guard would be great if not for the fact that it spoiled where Loki was going to open the portal to the audience, and I think finding it out with Stark really works wonderfully. Some of the added stuff in the battle is good too, but at the same time compromises the pace, like the bits with the guard and the chitauri gun (the audio and video of this part is also somewhat jarring). The additions with the waitress were great, though.

All in all I still preferred the original cut of the movie when putting the pros and cons of this edit. But that's just me. It's still a pretty good extended version of the movie.

While I liked this edit, I thought it could have been done better. Only some of the deleted scenes were colour corrected, meaning the ones that are not stick out like a sore thumb. I'm personally not a fan of the new framing device. But other then those things, the edit was well done.