It's interesting you mentioned Criterion, but back when Sega was releasing their Sega Ages games on PS2, there was a period of time where I regularly compared them with Criterion style releases. They were collections of classic Sega games, mostly from the 16-bit era and before, faithfully emulated/ported onto the PS2 with a ton of display options, resolutions, scanlines, etc. But that wasn't all. There was a ton of effort put into having every version of a game available - Japan, US, Europe. They also contained extra features like design documents, production artwork, manuals and covers from the various different releases, all in digital form. The physical packages were great too. The manuals were thick, and filled with commentary and retrospectives on the games from magazine editors and sometimes the original developers themselves.
But these releases didn't sell a ton, there wasn't a huge market for them, and it seemed that people were more than content with the sloppy releases on PSN and XBLA by Digital Eclipse complete with terrible upscale filters and so on. It clearly shows that the consumer base for games mostly don't care. If the people who buy the games don't care, why should the publishers?
