Right, I probabily watch more HD stuff than anyone else on this site (though that said I don't have access to any HD channels so I can't just stick those on, though my understanding is a lot of content has essentially just been upscaled), so I feel the need to take apart your points one by one.
The reason I see it as a problem is the same reason people thought "who needs 8.5GB of data on a DVD?"
Who does need 8.5 GB of data on a DVD? I can deal with multiple disks, with my nice movie on 1 disk and crappy features on the other disk
In the future 30GB won't be anywhere near enough. And 3 layers just defies the point doesn't it? Considering it's the same amount as a dual layer blu ray...
Well actually 3 layers of 17GBs would be 1 GB more than 2 layers of 25GBs, so how that 'defies the point' I'm not sure. Why 30GBs won't be anywhere near enough? Not too sure about that either.
The future has definitely go to come down to the size. A few years ago DVD quality was great, now we want HD quality, pretty soon someone will want better quality and a HD DVD won't be able to provide it. Also from a film making perspective you don't have to compress your film as much to fit on a blu ray. This may seem silly at the moment sure, because HD DVD and Blu-ray are both so different from DVD that you can really tell the difference, but it won't be long until you play a HD DVD at maximum compression against a blu-ray disc at maximum compression and you will be able to tell the difference.
The future coming down to simple specs would mean the DS wouldn't have over double the world wide sales of the PSP, it would mean the Wii wasn't just about to catch up to the total world wide sales of the 360. Blu-Ray doesn't support better quality than 1080p, it's written in to the way Blu-Ray players work, so it doesn't work like that. If a better quality did come out that was widely supported, HD DVD is the only format out there where you can guarantee the players can update themselves for it. The
highest quality codec takes the least amount of space for its quality, that is h.264.
I can tell the difference between an mpeg2 encoded Blu-Ray movie and a VC-1 encoded HD DVD. I took my little brother in to town a few months back, the first time I'd seen an HD Movie in the 'wild' on a real 1080p T.V, I gave it 1 look and said "I bet that's Blu Ray" and I chuckled when I looked down and saw a Samsung Blu Ray player.
The maths doesn't add up, there would be no reason to see a "maximum compression" Blu Ray or HD DVD, allowing for 1080p resolution, 24 bit colour depth, 24 fps, 5 GBs worth of audio, and 3 hours of move, you can have INSANE bit rates for h.264. So much so, it would have to be pretty poorly encoded for you to notice any difference between making the movie 25 GBs or 22 GBs.
I really do not understand how this is even an issue with anyone. Blu-ray is indisputably the better medium, instead people are worrying about the price that it is right now, when next year the price of both will be probably around half what it is now. Ok you might say that HD DVD has some better features in its players... but if this 'cleverness' was but into the better medium, surely everyone would have a better output?
It's not though, there are lots of technical superiorities of HD DVD, companies like Microsoft and Intel didn't choose to back it for company political reasons, they have stated if Blu-Ray wins they'll support that, but from a technical standpoint HD DVDs pros outweighs its cons. I don't even know what that last sentence means.
HD DVD almost saw its demise too, being outsold significantly by blu-ray, until they gave a multimillion dollar 'incentive' to Paramount so that they only will release on HD DVD.
I can just see (although I sincerely hope that it won't happen) a VHS vs Betamax war going the wrong way again.
HD DVD didn't almost see its demise at all. It was being outsold 2 to 1 in America alone for the last few moths (though the ratio has been decreasing month on month) and has only been doing so significantly better in America since the PS3. Now that's a little worrying for the Blu Ray camp in some respects, at this point including the PS3 the number of Blu Ray players outnumbers HD DVD players well over 7 to 1? Without any figures I don't want to assume to high a number but it could probably easily be 12+ to 1. Yet total Blu Ray sales are only 2 to 1 that of HD DVD in America. In other regions the gap is a hell of a lot thinner.
Before the PS3 the Blu Ray camp only had about a 1-3% sales advantage, and given most PS3 owners seem to only buy 1 Blu-Ray and decide they're not too impressed, the figure of Blu-Ray sales could drop a hell of a lot once almost all new PS3 owners already have seen a Blu-Ray on a mates PS3.