What sucks about STID getting post-converted is that Abrams not only wanted to stick with film but also shoot some of the movie in IMAX. The studio let him do so, but they still mandated a post-conversion since they were spending so much on the movie and needed a guaranteed return on their investment. Because they were focusing their resources on the 3D, rendering the cgi in native stereo and so forth, they weren't able to render the IMAX shots at their full height. As a result, the handful of IMAX 15/70 2D prints have the IMAX shots matted down to 1.66:1, as opposed to the full 1.44 height of the frame. The Imax 15/70 3D prints of the movie apparently cropped the 1.66 image to fill up the entire screen for maximum immersion, losing information on all four sides of the o-neg.

Therein lies the propensity for tacking on the 3D. When so much of the movie is being done in the computer anyway, why not just convert the live-action stuff and be done with it? It's too bad there aren't more 15/70 theaters out there. I feel like that would've earned more respect for Abrams' intentions from the studio heads. But since his name isn't Christopher Nolan and the name of the franchise isn't Batman, I guess it was a no-brainer to make an extra four dollars per ticket from the thousands of 3D screens out there instead of settling for an extra five dollars a ticket from the only few hundred imax screens out there (which would then be an extra six dollars a ticket because it's imax 3D).