> How far off are we from having finalized hardware to the point where the raw > Laserdisc captures can be made and won't need to be made again in the future? (and > then any further work handled in software only)
I'm reasonably sure even the DdD hardware version 2 was at that point, and version 3 simply expands capabilities and makes it a bit friendlier.
Even so, with utilities like ld-combine on the software side of things, it will be important to obtain not just a capture or two of one disc, but ideally, as many captures as possible of multiples of the same disc.
For those not in the know, ld-combine will take multiple captures of the same make and model of disc, and determine on a per-line basis which of the captures is higher-quality, to assemble a capture which is in better shape than either of the two (or three, or four, etc.) source captures.
The principle is that dropouts usually don't happen in exactly the same place on every disc, and so a bad line in one capture may not necessarily be a bad line in another.