Thank you for that, it helps a lot. I see your point on the credits - while it may seem useless to some, perhaps a simple script that checks the final size of a CRF encode, and discards it if over a certain size, starting over to encode again with a CRF value one lower (a smart script might even be able to judge how much larger the encode is than the desired size, and choose between 1, 2, or 3 lower depending on the overage).

Oddly, I see the potential in zones evening out quality in projects using different sources. Maybe CRF 16 for Upscaled HD footage, while bluray footage gets CRF 20+ to degrade the quality of the film through encoding the same way SD footage was originally degraded through encoding. I'd imagine this would work far better than any unsharp tool.