Apple stripped AppleScript functionality from QuickTime Player - in a fairly rude way

Once upon a time you could use AppleScript to make QuickTime Player do many of the tricks that QuickTime Player Pro is supposed to do. In those days people wrote scripts to do things like batch file translation:

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Update 3/30/2008: I found an AppleScript that should do what I need. It tells QuickTime Player to open multiple AVI files, process them to DV stream, then delete the originals. Unfortunately, it's giving me cryptic error messages.

Update 3/31/2008: I'm beginning to think Apple quietly disabled AppleScript driven conversion in QT Player. Nobody seems to know anything about it.

As you can probably guess my theory of 3/31 seems to be correct.

When I ran those scripts with QuickTime Player, they simply didn't work. No error messages, but the AppleScript APIs didn't seem to do anything.

I paid for QuickTime Player Pro and now the original scripts work.

This seems kind of obnoxious. At the very least QuickTime Player should have produced an error message like "AppleScript functionality requires QuickTime Player Pro". Apple wasted a fair bit of my time.