The color grading is a funny one. I worked on a large episodic animated series that was released in the US from a 16mm print copy of the episodes. The original transfer was done at a facility that I worked at, but only as a tape assistant to the colorists. It was transferred as SD to DigiBeta. Years later, the film was brought back out and sent to another local post house for an HD transfer. The person in charge of that made some "interesting" decisions, and the transfer was universally panned. Years later, the same prints were scanned again to HD, but with a different producer for the project. At this time, the colorist also took a lot of interest in the project and found reference film material on the exact same film the prints were on. Using that reference, the colors came out drastically different from anything ever made from these prints. Even though the original creator of the animated series was never involved in any of the post process decisions, it was later relayed that he was extremely pleased with the results of this release as it was the closest to the colors as he had envisioned them way back when the series was being made.

Sometimes, the post processes loses a lot when people make decisions. It might take a special released version for the director to actually get a version they feel they wanted the world to see. Sometimes, yes, they go too far, but others it's actually a decent result.