This is somewhat incorrect. The interlaced copy modes can do what you're looking for, and were used by Swiss in the past.
This is essentially the method currently used by Swiss, but without using the vertical filter to do 2:1 linear downsampling.
It's likely the disk cache ballooning to an unmanageable size with 4Kn disks. It should be fine with 512e + GPT + exFAT.
It's unrelated. It fixes the pink sky in Superman 64.