I mean this with as much respect as I can muster, but smoothing out the way she wrote her poems in her own hand in order to make them easier to read is like going back and editing Shakespeare into prose paragraphs. It's the same concept. We find Shakespeare's work too difficult to understand and troublesome in iambics so we turn it into prose. What a travesty to go back and take any artists' work and make it more amenable. God save us from straining a little to meet the artist where he or she wants to be met. If you want amenable read light verse. Dickinson was and is not in desperate need of revision. The challenge is for the reader to realize this and to keep working until they see it or stop reading. Don't go back and take the highly original work of possibly America's greatest poet and "fix it." If she'd wanted it to be read like everyone else's poetry she was perfectly capable of changing it to suit current taste. She was offered the opportunity but, like any real artist, she refused to do so. I do wonder if the fact she was a sheltered woman of the upper-middle class is the reason so many people try to deny the reality that she was an avant-garde poet. One of the first to kick over what nineteenth-century poetry had turned into? I know of no one who is smoothing out Whitman and it isn't only because he self-published his book. She was not the Belle of Amherst. She was the she-wolf of the wild and original.
Also, it must be pointed out that Dickinson's reputation before Johnson did his work was middling at best. It wasn't until a gifted and awestruck editor turned his attention to restoring her work to the original that she exploded in reputation and influence. There is a reason for that. Todd's edits turned her into a conventional poet, no different than dozens. It wasn't until we saw Dickinson herself that she was recognized for her genius.
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