It is rare for me to cancel an order with Amazon, but my pre-order placed on July 17th showed no sign of movement, so cancel I did.
I made the 55 mile trip to my nearest Best Buy in a neighboring state and purchased it there. I found my motivation after all.
They had only two copies and neither were on display. An employee brought both copies out from their stockroom and he told me to choose which one I wanted. I chose the one that had a nearly perfect package.
Now to pry the discs out of those damnable cardboard sleeves without scratching them and transfer them to the protective plastic sleeves recommended by forum member Bolty. My quest to obtain this set comes to a (hopefully happy) end.
Edit: All discs were unscratched, but that interior most cardboard sleeve with the Director's Edition 4K disc had a vice grip on the disc. The outer page with the two disc slots were much easier to remove the discs from. The anti-static plastic sleeves that I transferred the discs into work beautifully and they easily fit right back into the original cardboard sleeves. I did decide to relocate the blu-ray extra features disc into that super tight interior card board sleeve as I will watch it the least often.
