I recently picked up a bunch of tapes with 16mm transfers of the show. While they won't look as good as the DVDs, they'll be uncut and run around 26 minutes. I'll sacrifice a little quality and take that any time.
99.9999% of the public have no clue as to edited vs unedited episodes. Shows like this are such a miniscule niche market and the DVD market in general is about a quarter of what it was a decade ago. There is no way that a company is going to go to the expense of re-transferring the film prints...
Unless there's a cable sale involved, I seriously doubt that MOD would justify the expense of going back and retransferring 200+ episodes of the series.
I assume the same. If they ever put out 5 & 6 (which is awful by the way) separately, I might pick them up but I'm not re-buying just like I didn't re-buy Route 66.