HDTV picture size on standard 4:3 TV

[Electronic M]

Haven't seen nonuniform stretching yet, but a while back when watching Fox News I saw something for the first time that I've been morbidly anticipating for some time....a TRIPLE boxed comercial(once pillar boxed twice letter boxed...my 19" Zenith CCII became like a 10" set, UGH!)! Now broadcast engineering as a field is legitimately dead to me.
When I started seeing double boxed content(letter and pilar) for the first time my reaction was: 'Ugh! you are charging how much for cable?...And you are spending how many million in equipment?...And you morons don't have a device set up to detect and eliminate multiple redundant boxings and fix it by expanding the center to fill the screen!?!?!?'

I mean seriously, either the engineers have their heads WAAAY up their buts, corporate pencil pushers are ordering the engineers to do things that are bad ideas, or no one in the TV broadcast industry gives a CRAP about folks that still have NTSC sets and want PROPERLY down converted content for them.