I haven’t read this whole thread. But I’m aware that some have claimed that there’s frame blending on every version released so far. Do we actually know this to be the case for the PAL SE DVD? Given that it’s simply a sped up version of the 24 fps film, it doesn’t need any frame blending (which is not to say they haven’t screwed with it anyway). The NTSC DVD of course is afflicted.
The Restoration team website mentions that the PAL video was a DEFT conversion.
As mentioned above, the preferred method of converting film-based content that has been hard telecined with 3:2 pulldown to 30fps is to IVTC back to 24fps then speed up to 25fps.
While a DEFT conversion purports to do this, it does all other kinds of shit as well. So you end up with video that has 4% speedup and blended fields…