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Having worked with the U-Matic format for the better part of 35 years I will try to answer your questions however despite my experience I'm not an expert.
1st generation VO series, 2600 was the base recorder VP the playback only, both are what's considered lowband, carrier deviation was 1.6 MHz with the chroma downshift to 688 khz resulting in a luma resolution of 250 horizontal lines and about about 30 lines of color resolution. There was an earlier"home" deck with a tuner however I'm leaving this one out. This was replaced in the early 80's with the second generation VO and BVU series of front loading machines. The luma carrier was bumped up slightly but the deviation remained the same resulting in less crosstalk and 3db bump in S/N. The BVU series also has a rear panel DUB connection that allows editing without the up and down conversions of the baseband video signal, the highband was still good for 250 lines and was far more stable. My BVU-870 is an SP with the onboard VITC TCG, this was an option for the BVU and I believe the VO-9800 series. SP pushed the luma carrier to some 6.6 MHz with a 1.5 MHz deviation making it backwards compatible with the previous generation however I have not tried an SP tape on a gen-1 deck. The SP retained the same 688 khz color downshift and the somewhat blotchy color resolution of about 30 lines, luma resolution was about 330 lines and had a better S/N. The BVU and higher level VO editors have flying erase heads for frame accurate editing, lower end editors used brute force overwriting.
3/4 was used for ENG by the big -3 networks through the 1980's, by the end of the 70's many stations had the better TBC's from the likes of For-A, Microtime and CVS so they could use the 3/4 format on air until Betacam became the defacto standard. One of the local stations ran Sony M3a cameras on Sony VO-8800 U-Matic S decks until the early 90's then went to the BVW-25 before becoming a FOX affiliate. In 1994 I was involved with the production of Midwest Country and that was all done on JVC 8250's with JVC KY-2700 cameras. Not the HiDef of today but it's still good overall broadcast quality.
I don't know how much was edited on the 1" type-c, that was more of a prime format used for tape delay and time shifting, my first experience with the format was January 28, 1986 and I still have the original tape. Raw NASA of the shuttle disaster, no narrator or commentary. I know type -c is good enough to feed a broadcast xmitter raw with only the accy TBC, 3/4 needs a bit more correction before it's air legal.
The SP decks started with the BVU-870 for the editor and BVU-150 for the portables, the 950 was the final word of the format and they're still commanding the dollars. I have the 870 and it looks just as good as Betacam SP however I can see the chroma limits on the finer details, saturated colors will bleed over the luma contour borders.
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