I was the special features producer. The commentaries are kinda hit-and-miss (I did 3, some other guys did a couple; mine were admittedly pretty last-minute), but there's a bunch of liner notes and the pilot films are pretty interesting to watch.
The show could actually work pretty well in Blu-ray, but there's a catch. The only HD masters in the wild for the first series are what TMS (the Japanese studio who owns the anime rights) put together. TMS (or VAP, whomever actually did the remaster) took a weird shortcut: they freeze-framed everything for scenes where there's no motion, and where there's only little motion, everything is frozen except the grain around the moving element. This is true both of the new US DVDs and the Japanese Blu-rays.
On the DVD set, this problem isn't super-noticeable unless you're watching the screen fairly closely and intently (on a PC would be a pretty dead giveaway). But on Blu-ray...oh man. The frozen grain particles alone are obvious as heck. The US company that released the new DVD set, Discotek, considered releasing the show as Blu-rays but after watching the Japanese release, they decided it was a downgrade from the DVD and abandoned the idea altogether.
Maybe someday the Japanese will remaster the show properly without grain-freezing, but the DVD is still pretty watchable even with it. It's not perfect, of course, but it's infinitely better than the Hong Kong bootlegs everyone in the fandom used to buy online for years just to have their fix. The colors pop and the details are clear.
If the price is holding you back, I think DVDPlanet has it on sale for like $25(!) for another day or two, and DeepDiscount had it for about $32 with free shipping also when I checked last night. Quite the savings over Amazon's $50....
And you're welcome! And thank you! If you have any questions about the series or whatever, you can always just message me on here. I'll try not to hijack the "Fujiko" thread anymore.