(Yeah I know I am a calibration Nazi) I was serious about at least putting the greyscale settings test pattern on the disc so that people at least have the contrast brightness set correctly.
My friends have all had to put up with me calibrating their TVs at some point in time, and although they bag me out about it, most of them have been amazed at the result (I do a convergence alignment as well, which really scares them!)
Actually Avid Pro 4.5 has a great frame by frame correction tool that would be perfect for sparkle removal. It's a shame your set suffers from it so badly.
Just on another note, I watched my DE set on my home LD player and got about half a dozen sparklies in ANH, on the LD player at work there are *none*. So it looks like some players laser pickups are better at reading crappy areas on the disc than others.
I am very keen to make a DVD-9 for ya, especially if you encode using Cinemacraft encoder - it should look very nice indeed - I finally found some decent priced good quality Dual layer media.
Good luck with it all.
LM