[Rinehart]

Well, as I said, I haven't so far watched large numbers of them, but of the ones I have seen, the biggest defect I have noticed is blurry images. However, I am looking at them downloaded from YouTube, so it is difficult to say whether that was present in the original kinescope or exists because of the data compression involved it putting them up. I'm guessing that it's probably a little of both.
I am afraid that I don't follow your meaning when you said "Could you be overthinking the mechanics and discounting long-retention phosphors?" Perhaps you could elaborate on it to make it a little more clear to me.
I started this post because I came across a statement in a book which seemed not to make sense to me: Battison said essentially that running the film at 24 fps when making the kinescope would preserve interlacing, but that running the film at 30 fps, capturing each video frame in its entirety, even if it were possible to do, would not retain interlacing. Since I am not a technologist, and Battison was a broadcast engineer of unquestionable credentials, I assumed that I had misunderstood his meaning.
However, the people who post on this forum are no slouches, either, and since the consensus seems to be that Battison was mistaken, possibly due to poor editing of the book, I reluctantly have to accept that judgement.
There are a few video clips on You Tube and Dailymotion that have kinescope recordings and videotape recordings of the same shows running side by side for comparison, and when you see them together it's quite remarkable how poorly kinescoping compares with videotape.