Noone put any effort into it. It's pure incompetence and negligence the way they handled the transfers. Perhaps they didn't even want to remove the pillarboxing, but even if they did they had the wrong reason for it. It was pointless (overscan in 2006 anyone?), they've lost information on both sides and the encode didn't even have new detail.
They just didn't care. It was hard to swallow, but it's been 9 years already. Let's move on.