Ray on DVD

I have a little warning I'd like to give out concerning the new DVD of Ray...
The disc gives you the chance of watching the theatrical cut of the film (2 hours, 30 minutes), or the new "extended version" which beefs up the running time to 3 hours. While I was excited to see this version, hoping it would add material to where the film left off (it ends quite abruptly), it instead adds material here and there all the way through the film. That's perfectly fine with me... but there are a few problems with this: First of all, almost everything that was cut out of the film deserved to be left on the cutting room floor. The pacing is completely ruined by the inclusion of the extra material. What once was fast, fun, exciting and fresh now feels bogged down with unnecessary material and overlong scenes.
Second, and probably even more important than the first from a common-sense standpoint, no work went into trying to smoothly integrate the scenes back into the film. I REPEAT: THE NEW SCENES LOOK TERRIBLE! The first new scene appears to be from a VHS source (totally unforgivable for such a recent film), and the rest, while they appear to be alright at first glance, have major problems: None of the scenes are color-corrected(!) and they don't match the rest of the film whatsoever (this is only really apparent in scenes in which an extended piece has been added to the end of the scene). [View examples of this below]. To top this off, one of the scenes is not even a deleted scene, but an outtake, branched in by mistake... so in the middle of the film, you suddenly have this same line being played over and over again, and hear the director say "cut" over and over again, and then you go back into the movie... And because the editor and the director did no additional work to integrate the scenes back into the movie, the sound suddenly becomes mono in the deleted scenes (music sequences aside), and in another added scene, we see the entire scene play out the way the director intended it (in a different place in the film), but then a few minutes later, we see the SAME SCENE AGAIN, trimmed down, because this is the way (and the place) it appeared in the theatrical cut. So once again, the scenes have just been spliced in with no sort of additional editing done (scenes that are extended that take place within music sequences are quite awkward - the music is playing in the scene, and then the extended piece comes in, with no music, and then it goes back into the theatrical cut, playing the rest of the song).
Here's the real kicker, however: Universal, in an effort to save money (nobody really wanted this project...Universal didn't fund it, only bought it for distribution) has decided against putting the extended version on a separate disc, and has instead put both the theatrical and extended cuts on one disc, accomplishing this with "seamless branching"...the only problem is, unlike The Abyss DVD, which used the branching with a truly "seamless" effect, the Ray DVD is the victim of shitty authoring at the DVD production house, resulting in HUGE, very apparent pauses in playback when a new scene starts playing at the end of an old one. It would have been much more preferable to do what the studio did with Almost Famous, putting each version of the film on a separate disc, and spreading the extra features across both discs. As it stands, now the only real way you should watch the film is the theatrical version, which is still a great movie. If you want to watch the deleted scenes, then turn the disc over and watch them separately...you probably won't be as annoyed that way.
Example 1:

Example 2: