Man I actually have the opposite problem! My old DVDs look terrible on my new TV. I'll take a fuzzy HD upgrade over a super crisp picture of a VHS tape any day.

Oh man, I've totally done that. The zoning out is real.

Look at the numbers from my own channel. I posted a dry explainer on the new county landfill fees. It got maybe 150 views in two weeks, then slowly climbed to 20k over the next month without any big account sharing it. The algorithm does test content with small groups first. If those people watch the whole video and share it, it gets a bigger push. Your video might have just needed more time to find its specific audience who cared about zoning.