This question may be out of place on this forum...

SH - Have you tried encoding your own personal masters with Dolby? In other words, is all of the sound getting "lost" at just the Dolby stage or is it a complilation of that plus what happened at other parts in the mastering chain?

I think you even mention this at one point in your post. It would be a really cool comparison if you could encode your files in dolby and then also encode them in DTS. It would give you a really nice comparison point between the two formats.