Yeah, that'll definitely be an improvement there and it is exactly the reason why I want to use the BD and to cut in and export from Premiere - the source wouldn't have made any difference in the compression artefacting if I was still using the shitty PowerDirector encoder.

And as to the resolution, sure, that is the list of properties of one of my despecialized shots exported from AE, and like I told you, all my sources were 1280x544 or 1280x546 (the HDTV source) and then I cropped them all to 1280x542 when exporting the film, just to be sure there weren't any differences in AR between shots and also to keep the cropping about the same as on the official DVDs.