Why is that unfortunate? I would have thought you'd be happy that there was a better source available. Or is it unfortunate that you only found out about it after your VHS preservation was complete? :)

Yup, the latter.

Using the VCR's digital stabilization I played back the break-up portions on slow and captured it.

The digital slow motion frames are less sensitive and only resulted in 1-2 actual unusable frames.

I then decimated it from a variable 150-ish fps back to 23.976... so I suppose fdecimate was used to filter.

I then cut the repaired clips back in using Womble.