I have never gone through those editions from front to back, but I've studied up on the situation a bit and it all sounds a bit bizarre. It's not really that Howard's work was incomplete, they went in and literally changed stuff. Maybe to make it more readable for a modern audience? I dunno. There are lots of tiny changes to the language that seemed unnecessary throughout (I remember reading one where the word girdle was changed to belt :lol). On the whole, I hear that it loses some of the "weird fantasy" flair that Howard had and reads more like present day fantasy.
My brother who is an even bigger REH fanatic than me has read these re-releases and he also mentions that De Camp went into some of Howard's non-Conan stories, changed them around a bit, and turned them into Conan stories. I don't really know how or why he did that, but it seems pretty bizarre and disingenuous.
De Camp and co. also tried to create some sort of internal chronological order with the Conan stories, which is silly since Howard never meant for there to be a traditional order. With the Del Rey books, they're presented in the order that Howard originally wrote them. Even his sketches of maps and notes are presented in the order that they were created, so as you're reading you're literally seeing Howard build Conan's world from the ground up. It's quite fascinating.
As I said, I've never gone through those edited editions entirely so this is only what I've heard from other Howard fans and what I've read about them. Either way, with the Del Rey books out now for just about everything Howard did, those are definitely the way to go these days. Whether it's Conan, Solomon Kane, Bron Mak, Kull, whatever. Completely unedited and in their original order. Plus the illustrations in all of them are great, and there are some nice essay-type pieces in each one. Solomon Kane even has a tribute piece by H.P. Lovecraft called "In Memoriam" about Howard and his writing that's really neat.
I'm working on the second book in the series myself.
