Is remastered mainly just less jitter?

Like the film business , it’s a sausage factory.

Quality meat goes in.... and ground up chicken lips and arseholes - comes out.

Whatever drives the masses.. to making it a mindless ’pull sale’ (buyer requesting to buy), is what is done.

It’s about the money. How much can be pulled from the mass of the market, and the mastering is dictated by where the mass of the market sits and exists, in lifestyle and points of view.

It’s a numbers game.

I also use the DR Database to compare recordings. IMO dynamic range is important, but it is clear from actually listening to some RBCDs and their SACD counterparts that DR doesn't tell the whole story. My rule of the thumb is close to that used by @georgehifi , which is I want records that have an overall "green" score. (Unless it is a genre that wouldn't exist if it had a green score dynamic range--Oasis records come to mind.) If the SACD has a vastly different lower DR than the RBCD, the SACD probably isn't worth owning IMO. However, if the scores are close, for example if the RBCD score is a 16 (rarely happens but they do exist) and the SACD score is 15, then I'm inclined to hunt the SACD down on the used market if possible. Mastering and remastering, whether found on RBCD, SACD, vinyl, or a "hi rez" file, etc. can be done really well and add value or be done poorly and diminish a recording. 

+1 astewart8944

Just to mention CDs aren’t the only thing being overly compressed these days, as shown in the Dynamic Range Database. Vinyl reissues, SACDs, even hi res downloads. Even those cool SHM CDs from Japan are getting the business. The horror, the horror... There are now more than 106,000 albums contained in the DRDB. But who's counting?

geoffkait, I guess that shows what the record labels think of the audiophile market.