You're literally just arguing against how the law works in the US. I'm not going to argue against the fictional legal system you've set up in your head.

The 36 Cinema stuff resulted in a new copyrighted derivative work: the commentary. And they can distribute that commentary all they want...but to distribute the underlying films as part of a commercial offering they need copyright licenses to those films. It's irrelevant that the underlying films are not for sale at retail, since they can still acquire a copyright from the copyright owner.

Format-shifting isn't fair use. It's literally an act of copying that is subject to copyright protections. Format-shifting might be fair use, but you have to do the full analysis, and format-shifting to avoid paying for a copy in the destination format is not fair use.

That's just one of the things that the fair-use rules and exemptions in copyright were written to help resolve positively.

Now you're just making stuff up. 17 USC 107 sets forth the basic rules for fair use, and they're quite limited.

When was the last time you saw a VCR?

Last week. Best Buy and Walmart still sell VCRs...Millions of people in this country still have old TVs with purely analog connections.

You are not obligated to pay for content again and again in every medium, format-shifting is also an allowable kind of fair use.

Actually, yes, you are, since each offering of the content in a different medium is a different copyrightable work subject to its own copyright. A VHS copy of a film is very different from the Bluray copy of the same film.