Yea your right. The daughter board was to improve composite on those units that had horrible composite out. For the price of the systems it was pretty sad they had those video issues on the first couple of runs. I had a deck that had really bad composite out,lacked the daughterboard. It was a Jp deck and was the third AES I ever owned and by far the worst. I was overall pretty pissed off over it so I modded it for S-video. This was back in 1999. the last runs had much better composite,but the RGB ended up not being as good. But really,its not all that bad RGB wise still.
But I mean,yea all in all,no excuse for the flaws they had. For the asking price they should have been near perfect.