home viewers aren’t engineers. there will be a loss. at all steps. everywhere. expansion of the universe styles. even the top engineer within ranges will get maybe 90-99% and that’s at best case. now repeat that multiple times. it’s physics. when you re-record or retransmit something analog you lose. every time. in detail. in clarity, in absolute range. that’s a very long pipe from the cell to the analog tv set all steps included, and the art direction accounted for that.

and also, it’s way easier to instruct a girl in the paint department (how it was done then) to paint a solid color within the lines, from a specific color number, than to worry about how well they painted a subtle gradient. so yes, it was also partially so to the art production method as well.

so it’s an artistic decision driven by the technical limitations when even the BEST technician were working within an upper quality bound.

see the sister reply to yours in this thread. he was doing analog to digital with experts and they had to account for the fiddliness and that was a single step transfer.