Ugh no thanks, AI upscales are exactly what I don't want and not something that should be mentioned in the context of fan projects like the 1977 star wars restoration which take great care to restore the original content instead of hallucinating higher resolutions.

My main problem is that the publicly available non-streaming releases are NOT 480p but 480i (actually even worse than that, partially interlaced and partially telecined) with horrible compression artifacts. With access to the production masters you could surely produce a better release than that.

Your "never" is also a needlessly strong word - people would also have said TOS and TNG remasters would "never" happen before they did. Also keep in mind that just because a company says something is not profitable it doesn't mean that they wouldn't make the money back - it could also mean that they just wouldn't make as much profit as they would doing something else. That means that even small changes to the equation or just someone pushing for it hard enough can sometimes tip the scales. Blu-ray sales declining are also not really an argument as streaming services didn't kill production of new series either. But we were also lucky that the trek remasters we got were faithful to the originals which is not guaranteed to be the case so maybe we are better off without more remasters in the current climate.