The hand he received at the end of Empire Strikes Back had skin and was normal looking.
shareLimitations in special FX, I suppose. It would've been much harder to do a robot hand back in the days of the OT.
I feel like the OP question is being misunderstood. The question being why did Luke have a fully metallic robot hand in the Di$ney trilogy when he had a human like skin covering his robotic hand in the OT? I'm pretty sure there is no real explanation other than it was simply an aesthetic choice made by the filmmakers to visually emphasize/remind the audience that Luke had a robotic hand.
shareThanks, that's exactly what I was asking.
shareDidn’t they show a glimpse of the robotics underneath the hand at a point in ROTJ, in the wrist or something, or am I just mixing in images from Terminator?
shareAnswering my own question, and the OP:
https://newmediarockstars.com/2016/01/happened-lukes-mechanical-hand/
Also when his hand was shot in ESB the mechanics showed through a hole in the synthetic skin: https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-9e0669ad8bba57a50a36b1acc0eacc42
shareThere's a 'sex with metal machines is the new sexuality' trend in modern Star Wars.
You had that with Land 'pansexuality', banging a metallic droid. And the new metallic hand in Luke is because it's the hand he uses to jerk off 😁
I think the first reference to a droid having that kind of, ahem, functionality, was back in "Shadows of the Empire," but it was with a human replica droid, which would make a lot more sense.
shareWe already saw part of the mechanics underneath the artificial skin in ROTJ. Obviously something happened to the rest of the fake skin in the 30 years after ROTJ. They don't need to explain every little thing.
shareHe jerked his (light)saber so much, his (fore)skin fell off.
share