I think Harvey's comment about the editor is being misinterpreted - I think he was trying to say that an editor of an anthology of ALREADY published works has no right to change the copyrighted words of a short story or poem because he or she feels "it would sound better this way".

An author will work with the editor for the original publication of a piece of work, but later editors usually don't feel that they have the "artistic" freedom to change a published story, except to perhaps condense it (and, hopefully, state that the piece is abridged or excerpted).

In a community theater for which I worked crew once, the director yelled at the actors who were screwing up their lines "This play won a Pulitzer Prize the way it was written - don't think you can improve it!"