Harmy said:
The thing is that when you un-crush the blacks, more grain that was previously hidden shows up. And also compression eats up a lot of grain, so that's why this higher bitrate encode looks overall more grainy.
Wow! I honestly thought you had added it, I had no idea standard-definition had killed the grain so much on the 2004 DVDs. Who knew the blu had so much grain? I sure didn't.