Nice to see you around here again, dbear. It's been quite a while.
Steve tends to juice his stuff a bit much.
"Tends to"? Really? I might just have to see what he has to say for himself on that one.
There are occasional evident cases of Steve having goosed a scan or otherwise botched the adjustments, where there's an alternative copy of the same scan to compare with that isn't, or it's just obviously over the top compared to how it should look. In general though, they don't look that far off from the prints: contrasty and colorful. Steve physically handles this stuff before scanning, and sometimes exhibiting it. He knows what this stuff actually looks like. What he certainly isn't doing is toning that down to accommodate people who think the transfers are being goosed when it is in fact their improperly-configured TVs or monitors doing the goosing, or who just don't like it aesthetically.
The presentation of this print isn't perfect. Examining it more, it looks like there was an RGB<->YUV conversion with the incorrect matrix (BT.601 vs. the proper BT.709 standard for HD) somewhere in the pipeline, distorting the colors slightly, including blowing some reds out and obliterating some linework; if I display it using the BT.601 standard, those reds come back just within range revealing most of the obscured detail (as much as is present). (The screenshots I posted above used BT.709, as a player normally would.) It may have been pumped up a little bit, but not by much from the looks of it. If I cut back the saturation by 1/8, it still looks great and devastatingly richer than the new Sony version.
I'll mention that he transferred a 16mm IB Tech print some time previously. It looks murkier and a little washed out, like a dupier version of the 35mm print. But that's the thing: it resembles the 35mm print more in contrast and color timing. The obviously-intended lighting effects are flattened out in the Sony version.