The story was that when Babylon 5 was being produced, conformed film masters were created in parallel to the digital video masters, for international distribution in countries that were still broadcasting TV off of film prints rather than using digital video tape or satellite downlinks. (I'm trying to track down the original source for this, but it's been over four years, and I'm pretty sure it was in a Tweet from JMS, which have become a lot more difficult to Google since the takeover; even the links I find aren't resolving, either because JMS deleted them or because the website is broken).
Supporting evidence includes the fact that the blu-rays seem to have more film-grain than the DVDs or prior SD releases, suggesting that they were scanned from a second-generation film copy and not the original negatives, every episode includes a "bumper" with the show's title between one of the act breaks, and the low quality of the VFX/composite shots (not just the motion judder, but also exaggerated contrast) suggesting an SD-to-film-to-HD pipeline rather than being sourced from the SD masters directly. Plus, the remaster was a total surprise; it just suddenly appeared on streaming and digital stores one day, and no one involved with the original show had had any idea that it was coming; a proper effort like what happened with TOS or TNG (or even a show like Seinfeld, which is about to get a re-release on 4K disc) would've taken years with a lot of people involved, and someone probably would've heard about it. "Remastering" Babylon 5 off of these existing film cuts would've been a lot easier, and taken a small team without a lot of support. Considering the errors that initially appeared, like whole missing acts from some episodes, they probably barely had editing equipment or quality assurance checks.
I think the inclusion of the commercial bumpers is proof enough that this was an old broadcast master, there's no possible reason anyone would incorporate those into a new reconstruction of the show, and failing to remove them shows a tremendous lack of support and effort in the project. The bare-bones blu-ray release also counts against the idea that this project involved the expense of going back to the original negatives and re-scanning them and reediting the episodes from scratch; it's be like serving a thousand-dollar kobe steak wrapped in old newspapers.
On the plus side(?), it means there's still low-hanging fruit for another on-the-cheap "remaster," this time sourcing visual effects and composite shots from something closer to the original (the digital tape masters, or even laserdiscs, for some episodes), plus clipping out the commercial bumpers, fixing the incorrect colors and styling on the on-screen text that was added for this release, and maybe even cleaning up the damaged audio tracks on the episode "Into the Fire."
Still, it's better than what happened to poor Stargate; their blu-rays had their audio tracks all screwed up, and the episodes that were originally mastered in HD were run through an unnecessary sharpening filter anyway because some dipshit in charge liked it better that way.
EDIT: Also, I resent the use of the term "obsessive," especially considering where we are and what the subject of the thread is, and that there's a 70/30 chance I'm the person being referenced.
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