Respectfully I disagree with you on all counts. I see the difference and so do others. These releases need to be kept "archival grade" IMHO, you can never get back what is lost.

Then it should be released as a 1080p 40gb mpeg2, or even some lossless codec. Pretending a 720p 15gb mp4 is archival grade is silly.

You being able to see the difference is more placebo than anything. You really do need comparison software to see the difference. The "tiny faction" is people who can actually see a difference, although plenty claim to.

If an archival grade copy is important Harmy should release a HUGE lossless encode into the wild. It is overkill for 99.99% of use cases, but just having access to it benefits many people. If it were 1080p, then yes, 15 gigs would be necessary, but since 720p is half the resolution, 8 is plenty.