Friedkin is one of those directors that pissed off the studios so much (despite making them truck-loads of money) that they took revenge on him any chance they could

the first dvd looked like a full-frame rip from the VHS

If I remember right, I first saw this because I misread the TV listings and thought I was going to get Jack Hill's "Sorceress" which is a pretty quality movie too, in its own way.

Is the Blu-Ray remaster really good? I find hat remasters of movies and (especially) music are almost always worse than the original prints, but the track record with movies isn't as bad as music. There are a handful of Abbey Road full-analog vinyl remasters that are fantastic (Mark Fry's Dreaming with Alice, that one Robin Scott album, and I think there's a third one) but other than that I can't think of any remastered albums that I don't prefer the originals to.

Yeah, it's good. Friedkin approved the master which was made from an original negative.
Like most old movies, the high resolution (supposedly 4K) brings out the grain in the stock pretty heavy, but that just comes with the territory once you get to films older than a certain point.

The thing about "Remastered" movies is that the term is basically used no matter whether or not the movie was legitimately remastered or not. Ideally, a digital version should be a scan of the best negative possible which is then sent through the best digital clean-up software possible. Best case scenario, and what some companies try to do (like Criterion) is not just get a good copy, but try to get the input of the original cinematographer (or someone comparable) to run the film through a Telecine process to make sure the colors are right and/or re-adjusted to be true to the original vision etc. and that flaws in the negative are cleaned up as best as humanly possible.

ironically Friedkin absolutely screwed up his "director approved" blu-ray of The French Connection

Sorcerer is really good but Wages of Fear will always be #1