and the fact that the cropping for the 4:3 framing is complete overkill
I think only the very first episode of the series has the extreme cropping issue, so not a real issue since they’ll have the level set for that.
and it’s a waste of time, even if one could make it look better it’d just be a stop-gap measure at best, you’d be better off working on deinterlacing the DBOX footage (assuming it needs to be deinterlaced) and working from there.
But yeah CCing the DBOX (are there any original Japanese broadcast rips that are good for color reference?) would be the best chance at having a decent copy of the series.