Rant: inconsistent Patlabor

Somewhat related to the post from last week, I have to get this off my chest: What the F*CK happened with Central Park Media's releases of the Patlabor series?

History Lesson
Well, Patlabor came west back in 1994 (give or take) when Manga Entertainment snagged the rights to the Patlabor movie. They released a pretty good dub and all was well with the world (in fact, in 1995 they also released a dub of the second film featuring the same cast reprising their English roles). Many years passed without much of a peep out of the western distribution world...

everything else
Then CPM snagged the rights to the non-movie versions of the Patlabor franchise. This is where the fun begins... They released a single volume to test the waters (I think it was 5 episodes). Month passed before they released a socond volume... with a totally incongruous cover. The content matched up just fine (same cast, etc) but if you ever see the boxed sets, you'll see what I mean: the first volume doesn't look anything like the volumes that followed.

Last word
I don't pretend to understand the motivations behind corporate America. But for whatever reason, the Patlabor TV series seemed to die a slow painful death... the final insult being that after repackaging volume 1 through 8 as two boxed sets (4 apiece), Volumes 9 and 10 were available before they repackaged those as well with a final 11th volume... you read that right: volume 11 was never available seperately.

Lost word
The OVA suffered an ever more ridiculous fate. Titled in English as "The New Files" the mini-series got a decent bilingual release... at least... part of it did. The "mythos" episodes were compiled on DVD and listed as "volume 1"... but the rest never came out: instead, "Volume 1" was repackaged as a "New Files" boxed set with the missing episodes ...which were never rerecorded in English (they are however, sub-titled).

Where does this leave me?
Well, for whatever reason, I never did find volume 8 available locally so now I'm scouring the web for it. I'm also looking for a decent price for the 3rd boxed set so that I can have volume 11. I'm debating whether or not to bother with the "New Files" because I've already got the "Griffon Saga" from volume 1. Ugh. I wish I knew what prompted CPM to make such a mess of things.