Cheers for that, I’ll have a look.
I’ll go through processing on my editing computer tomorrow, but by the looks of it almost certainly possible to use the classic repal plugin for Avisynth paired with a smartbob filter to force out a clean pseudo-PAL 24.975 from 29.97, then slow it back to 23.976 (assuming the BD to match is 23.976) without any temporal anomalies. Since resolution is already OTA VHS, I’d be more concerned about preserving cadence in motion.
For 720p a 92% resize is not going to be a real problem, but it might be worth trying against the crop approach just to compare results for yourself. There are plenty of downsizing filters with sharpening options to approximate the look of the original footage, so I wouldn’t get too hung up about it.