The impression I get is that all the CGI was done on a complete shoestring back then. Netter Digital and Foundation imaging always seemed to be on the brink of going broke.
I was watching interviews and reading some accounts from the animators on the wayback machine, on the making of Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future, which was done by Netter and Foundation - the same as Babylon 5.
This was after I found the non-DVD-released episodes here:
https://www.youtube.com/@nwk123/videos
The animators and modellers came across as being extremely talented and ingenious people that were working insanely difficult hours and were often treated as disposable and interchangeable by their companies.
This was sometimes mentioned on their personal sites, where they would showcase their work.
I got a lot of leads from this site here:
https://downthetubes.net/webfind-dan-da ... -dave-max/
I think, in the 90s, a fair few people in television didn't take 3D animation very seriously, outside of children's television, like Max Steel and Reboot.
It was a niche service and there was no established way of doing things. The only constant seemed to have been organised chaos.
As long as the current episode/series got done, nothing else mattered. That's why there looks to have been no backups or DR or any data protection, even though the technologies existed back in 1994. Everything was kept on various individual disks, that were discarded as soon as a project was over.
They didn't seem to use (at least not consistently) a central NAS server with RAID or replication to share data and back it up.
It looks to me that they passed those disks around to eachother inside the office.
And it's not like there was anything to archive their work, once both companies popped in the early 2000s.
So, it's not even like the Star Trek TNG remaster, where they had 95%+ of the original film clips that were compiled to re-create the special effects shots digitally, rather than on video tape.
At that point, anything that they were missing, they could add in again with CGI, or replace anything that didn't hold up 30-odd years later.
So, unless someone does an enormous amount of work to re-create the CGI scenes from scratch, and then signs the right away, then you're right.
All you can do is try to polish the existing footage with AI.
Then you have the additional problem that you mention of compositing that new footage with the live action shots of the characters, which is also going to be difficult.
Nobody will want to throw that much money at the B5 series, for the same reasons that CBS/Paramount won't spend money blu-raying DS9 and Voyager - The juice isn't worth the squeeze to them.
In any case, Paramount is being sold to ... someone currently. Paramount is announcing many Star Trek movies (which will never be made) probably to pad out the value of their franchise. This is at the same time that many of the dreadful nutrek shows are being shuttered.
I'm watching Star Trek Voyager at the moment. Once I get a little closer to the end of the series, I'll get the Babylon 5 blu-ray and see how good it is.