I have to say, I like the 2004 gamma levels better a lot of the time. In half the shots, you don't get any more real detail but more importantly the blacks just look milky and you have this thin haze on a lot of stuff. As was said, even the black bars are greyer. This isn't the solution--you aren't doing a new D.I. and timing it brighter, you are just turning up the brightness on the TV basically.
The sad truth is that this is the best they can do if they don't want to do a new scan. Unfortunately, since they are starting with an already-colour-corrected source, the detail is "baked in," and so are the shadows. It's not the same as working with the negative and re-timing it to have brighter levels. Instead they just did the same thing as turning up the brightness on the TV, but it doesn't always look good, in fact in some cases it looks worse.