OK, guys, here's a buttload of good news (well, assuming no unexpected problems arise):

I just reinstalled my windows and tried some new stuff in the process.

Not only does it seem that I will be able to use the Blu-Ray as my source, I will be able to use it with You_Too's awesome colour correction, which seems to solve many of the colour problems I was unable to solve myself (such as R2's over-blueness).

Furthermore, my room-mate just got a 2TB external HDD, which I should be able to borrow for encoding and it seems I figured out how to import the footage into Premiere, so it's bye bye PowerDirector-1pass-maximum-of-13mbps-mpeg2-encoding and hello Premiere-lossless-avi :-)

So, if all this works out, v2.0 should totally f*cking rock!!!

Oh and assuming a decent learning curve for Premiere, it could be done in about two weeks...