I want to float something regarding the 'thinning' of lines.
I've just spend a LOT of time comparing screenshots and reading discussions and I'm starting to suspect the fat lines we are used to is wrong.
Older transfers that have these thicker lines also lack a LOT of fine detail (check out the comparison of the Gold Alice in Wonderland. Almost half the image is gone.)
Now I'm not saying this is true for all transfers. Cinderella is overscrubbed, period. The Platinum Peter Pan is crazy soft to the point that fine detail previously present is absent. There are other offenders as well.
What I AM saying is I think the people making the old transfers for home video didn't necessarily have pristine prints and they were probably aware of the limitations of the medium they were going to.
For example, that Little Mermaid picture. What troubles me is about how perfectly matched up the two images are, even though the DVDs were drastically different. The first is letterboxed 1.66:1 (with some distortion IIRC) and the other is 1.78:1 anamorphic.
So somewhere in there, somebody did resizing and stretching with some method we don't know just to get those images the same aspect ratio and size.
BUT, if you are transferring a not so great source to a non-anamorphic DVD for standard definition TV and probably sharing a master with a VHS release? You'd probably boost the contrast so the image comes through and hit it with some sharpening or edge enhancement.
Quick and dirty test:
I don't want to say this gives a pass to all new Disney transfers, but the fact of the matter is with clean masters, DVD and/or HD only releases, and 7 years of changes in hardware and compression methods, you now have some breathing room for subtlety when you fine tune an image.
And yeah... that Dumbo image didn't show up when I first saw TServo2049's post. Those new colors are just ugly. But again, I'm troubled. What's the source of the image on top? The DVD bundled with the 70th anniversary release is supposed to be from the same master (isn't it?) The 60th Anniversary Edition is full of grain. Is it the 2006 Big Top Edition maybe? If so we have a winner.