Bill's suspicion as to why this got released has mirrored my own for about 3 or 4 years now: We got this release because Marketing has wanted to release this SO BAD for SO LONG now, and they finally got the go-ahead--but not the finances to do it right. When Marketing says they probably won't EVER get that money, I doubt they're exaggerating (for once) mostly because they had to fight for about 5 years straight just to get THIS OUT.
So this is the white flag, I guess. We got their attention and put them on the defensive, but Marketing can't get this done on their own, I don't think. Hale, Ward and Singh I believe would LIKE to have gotten this done right.
To address TR47's claims: The SE laserdiscs are a much better quality, containing much better detail. The color is too blue, but that can be corrected in a fanjob--but the smearing and detail loss in the 93 LD's has been very much noted. I'm also not surprised you think the SE lasers are oversaturated, as your transfers from the LD's tend to be very much DE-saturated, I feel. Between the two transfers, the video feel is most definitely more pronounced with the 93 lasers, due to the age of the transfer and the video smearing introduced by the noise reduction applied during mastering.
I also think you vastly overestimate blue-laser's market inroads by this same time next year, by a fair amount. DVD is going to be a very profitable and viable money-maker for at least another 3-5 years, EASY. Maybe at the tail end of that time period, will we see Blu-Ray/Hd-DVD start to seriously eat into DVD's profits, but it's not gonna happen that soon, the early adoption rate isn't THAT high, and the results aren't that jaw-dropping for a lot of consumers.
I hold almost zero hope we're going to get these in future versions, looking at how it's going down.