Even if the Levels had flopped (there is no evidence to suggest this, however), Funi could be blamed for sabotaging the sets from the outset by pricing them far higher than they needed to if they expected them to sell as well as the Season BDs or Orange Brick DVDs did. Because if they seriously did expect to do big numbers, there's no other explanation for why the Levels were priced so high for their contents, and why so much of the marketing seemed so geared towards the more serious fans/collectors/enthusiasts.
But, I don't think Funi would do that. It's bad business to deliberately sabotage a product like this; think of all the money that goes into transferring, cleaning up, marketing, authoring, manufacturing... It's huge costs, not the kind of thing you piss away to deliberately sabotage anything.
If the Levels had flopped, why would Funi have immediately done another Blu-ray set just two years later,
with the exact same expensive remastering process as the Levels but with awful filtering, manual shot-by-shot reframing/cropping, and loads of additional marketing on top?
If the Levels had sold poorly, there's no way they'd have repeated it two years later at a quarter of the price, with a far more aggressive/quick release schedule. So, it's more likely they expected the Levels to sell poorly, so they set the price high and gave long delays between releases so as to keep it profitable for the low sales expected for a high-definition collectors' set (in other words, they expected it to be like the Dragon Boxes except in high-def), only to find they were aiming at entirely the wrong audience and could make far more money if they re-assessed and aimed for a broader audience.
The Season BDs could have continued where the Levels left off in terms of style of remastering but with better marketing, cheaper per-box prices, etc., Funi simply elected to filter the shit out of the grain and crop it to widescreen after doing a slightly more rigorous Level remastering process (the Levels had some issues with tape marks being badly painted out such that details at the bottom of frame are weirdly distorted and have bits of the next frame that shouldn't be there; the Season BDs, 30th sets, etc. don't have this issue). By all indications, Funi's bigwigs simply think that look is better, and/or that it appeals to some imaginary grain-hating audience (there's no evidence such an audience exists, but it's entirely possible Funi's high-ups think it does; same is true of many studios).
So basically, the only problem with Dragon Ball's home video is that Funimation have, at every turn, resisted doing it properly when given the opportunity to do so. The higher-ups prefer to do something that we, the hardcore fans, utterly hate, and this point of contention would only be resolved if Funi's higher-up structure was completely replaced.
So, really the ship didn't so much sink as it was never really built. They started work on it on the Levels, but then decided to just throw it out there and let it sink so they can build a new ship that fits their own preferred specifications -- yes, it has no barracks for people to sleep in, and yes the food is literally the shit of their livestock, but people used the old ships that did that too. Of course, it never enters their minds that, in fact, the customers have no other choice if they want a ship that goes this way, so unless they go board a pirate ship, which most people won't do, their only choice is one of these god-awful insults to the very idea of a boat.
... I may have gone a little far with the metaphor there, but you get the idea!
