There is very little difference in resolution between 2K and 1080P.

I think the restorations and SEs were just done 10 years too early.

Remember the 2K scans were circa 1995, and a 9GB HDD was $2400.

At 4K you are looking at about 20TB per film, minimum, the storage alone, even at the end of 1995 when prices dropped to $300 per GB it would have cost around 6 million dollars to store a single 4K scan of the film, and the computers of the time would really not been able to handle it.

By 2005, storage was down to 70c per gigabyte, suddenly that meant storing a film at 4K was 'only' $14,000.00 worth of storage.

So in 1995, it wasn't so much being short sighted as not really being possible to do much more than they did from a cost and practicality point of view. In march 95 the Pentium 120MHz processor was Intel's fastest chip. Think about the processing power of that beast for a few minutes :) Most people were running Windows 3.1 or DOS in 95, the big boys had Silicon Graphics workstations, but they weren't drastically faster than the Pentiums by this point.

There is a good argument for Disney going back to the negative again and commisioning a new scan, it costs peanuts today compared to 1995 and the quality is so much better.

Heck, I just shelled out $3000 for storage , and I earn $28,000 a year. Disney could afford the time and money to get an archival quality scan of the three original films.