For anyone interested, I looked deeper into the Step By Step situation. In the previous DVD season set releases, Warners made several major screwups:
Season 1 & 2: ok but not ideal. The 4x3 content was encoded as 16x9 which means the black bars were encoded in the stream. 4x3 TV on DVD...
Yes, that's my question too. Warners screwed up on some of the original season sets. The episodes that were pillar-boxed they did so by actually chopping out the actual 20-25% of the picture. I know because one of the affected episodes is the S3 Christmas Story which was ALSO earlier released...