Hi Nelson.
It all depends on the local region's distributor, their standards and preferences. For example, Japanese distributors tend to have much higher standards for technical excellence and quality, and will reject several attempts by the US authors to get it right, before approving the disc master. I've worked in DVD authoring QC and can vouch for this 100%. The consumers in Japan are also much more demanding in this regard. There was a huge uproar in Japan about the color values of a popular animated film a few years ago, which even generated a lawsuit and I believe were recalled. And this, because the colors were slightly warm in a few scenes...
Masters already exist of both the 1.33 version and the 1.78 versions. They were made at the same time and were both mastered in HD, so no remastering or re-transferring would be necessary. They have to create new pressing masters and DLTs for each region, anyway, as they all have slightly different mixes of language and subtitle options, local studio and copyright warnings etc. They would have to redo the data-compression which is very costly.
The color problem is essentially this: several scenes that were shot day-for-night (ie: during the day, but with filters used and an effort to avoid shadows cast by the sun, and tweaking in the film color-timing later) and are supposed to have a somewhat dim, heavily bluish look to them, to simulate night-time sequences. The tech services department that color-timed the HD transfers, were clearly unaware of how the day-for-night sequences are supposed to look and made them look as if they occur in broad daylight, on a sunny afternoon. So, you'll have a sequence where Daphne gets up from her bed and leaves the room at night (studio filmed) and meets and is bitten by Barnabas on a nice, sunny day.
The color issues could easily be fixed by doing some tape-to-tape timing corrections. Not a very big deal.
The separate DME tracks should definitely exist at this point, if they wished to do a 5.1 remix, but that also is a huge cost.
While it's far from a certainty (whether there's even a market for the set to be released in Japan is questionable), there is a modest possibility that a release there would be corrected. At the point they'd be slated for release, once the Japanese QC departments see the 2nd episode on (with the correctly framed opening and end title sequences) and realize that the framing is incorrect, there would definitely be some back and forth discussion about how these should be presented.
