Beta or UHS? Get the facts in 1976

[ARC Tech-109]

Okay so an update on my 3/4 U-Matic caps project.
Been spending some time recently on putting together this little clips project and I'm at the point of uploading to YouTube however each time I do the end result looks like... don't step in it. My capture chain starts with a Sony VO-2860A U-Matic feeding a NOVA 800 TBC and that feeds the composite input of my DVW-A500 DigiBeta which then does the conversion to SDI which I capture as an .avi using a Blackmagic Decklink SDI card in my Tricaster TC550. From there I do the cuts using kdenlive under Fedora then export the entire project as a high rate mp4 and upload to YouTube which waters things down to basically garbage. What I'm fighting is the interlacing which is really making things look rough and coarse so my question is does anyone have suggestions on how to either interpolate the scan lines to a progressive format or somehow smooth things down? I've tried capturing direct from the composite using the Tricaster's own capture but this makes no improvement and uses a hardware mjpeg-2 compression which is great but the bit rate suffers as it's designed for web streaming.

The purpose of this is to demonstrate the ancient capabilities of the format itself and the camera I used to capture with which was a Sony DXC-M3a, these were recorded during the early 90's when the best we had was color-under for the home. Right now the modern tech is making things look far worse than what we had and with over 30 years of my own experience I'm at my wits end.

This is the results I'm getting right now, this was shot last weekend using a Sony DVW-790 DigiBeta camera, edited using kdenlive in Linux then exported as mp4 and uploaded to YouTube... https://youtu.be/4aiuFKTzbTA and it looks worse than VHS.

Now just for the sake of comparison these videos were also shot using Digital Betacam https://youtu.be/YDu7YpkkfJE and https://youtu.be/AUWMDCUofUg but with no editing, just captured using the SDI input of the camera bus of the Tricaster and watered down to mpeg-2.