Well, I started 'ramping up' 'production' around 2003. At that point, dvd's had been around for a good 5+ years. I still have quite a few of the first things I did, plus, you have to remember, that lots of commercial discs were dvd5's to begin with, so all one needed was a decrypter, and, some basic tools to null out the 'warning' screens and such.
I still have the machine I originally built to do recodes, before dvd-rebuilder (and two dvd burners that bit the dust in the years following). Single processor Athlon64. right around 2Ghz. Four years later, it was pretty much 'burnt up' doing all the work.
Usually, there are several different x264 recodes of things (on usenet), with varying audio, additional audios, subtitles (or not), generally a real mish-mash. Just like SD-DVD's, stripping out subtitles, or not doing the foreign language bits (like the native American bits in something like 'Dances with Wolves') are simply major oversights. And failure to include things like the Directors commentary (in OGG or other highly compressed format) is again, to me, major oversights. Takes extremely small amounts of the overall bit-space.
'If you want it done right, do it yourself'. That's one of my major 'things to do' over the next month or two. Once I get set up equipment wise (90% of the way there), and get my brain 'educated' as to the hoops to jump through, and get some confidence under my belt. Then it will be 'production time'. My schedule will be full over the coming winter.
The 'adoption' of BR/HD in general has been slow up until now. I live in a pretty high end city/neighborhood, surrounded by engineering types of both aircraft and software (homes are an average of 750K). But less than half even have HDTV's. SD is 'good enough' for most of them.