Like most things, the Germans have a word for this: Elefantenrennen aka "elephant racing!"

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/german-english/elefantenrennen

Gouging is the dealer charging $500 to code and install a new battery, or $1000/axle to have the brakes done. The people complaining about this don't have BMWs.

Ok, here's the skinny. 1080i is 1920x1080 @ 59.94 fields / second, meaning at any one instant in time, you're looking at a 1920x540 image made up of every other line of the picture (the odd fields, if you will.) Then, ~1/60th of a second later, you see the even fields. 720p is 1280x720 @ 60 FRAMES per second, meaning at any given instant you're looking at EVERY field of the image...not just the odd or even fields. If you were to try and take all 1080 lines from the original signal, they wouldn't really map properly to 720 at any given second because half of data would be from that same ~1/60th of a second later. Scaling the fields up is really the best way to go, at least for stuff that's been shot interlaced.