I have finally solved this Emperor scanline-mystery, it was as I initally thought could be the reason, the bad vertical detail caused by blurring in the GOUT. I got the idea to check an old copy of DrGonzo's Empire which are an old preservation of the Definitive Collection LD set from 1993, and behold...

It is quite sad when this old single layer DVD preservation of the Laserdisc that uses the same master as the GOUT have more vertical detail, and now we're only talking about the NTSC LD.