MIME? Wait...is that French?

Would somebody please help me understand the problem in PSEG Power N.Y., Inc. v. Alberici Constructors, Inc.?  Oh, I've read the opinion.  The notion that a party shouldn't be permitted to incomprehensibly separate e-mail messages and attachments seems so intuitively obvious that one wonders why the parties troubled the court.  No, my confusion centers on the parties being all atwitter about 3,000 e-mails from 750GB of native data (i.e., Outlook PST files).  The requesting party says it will cost $37,500 to reproduce the e-mails accompanied by their attachments.  The producing party says it will be $206,000.

It's just 3,000 Outlook e-mails--and nowadays, that isn't a lot of e-mail. Mind you, I appreciate that it may have required Herculean efforts to distill 750GB of Outlook e-mail to "just 3,000" e-mails, but the e-mail has already been reviewed for relevance and privilege.  The hard, expensive work is done.  Redaction and privilege issues appear to play no part in the projected cost.

So, why can't the 3,000 e-mails be produced quasi-natively in a MIME e-mail format embedding the attachments?  That's a universally recognized format (customarily denoted by .MSG or .EML file extensions) that lends itself to easy review on virtually any e-mail platform with no loss of attachments.  Wouldn't that be relatively cheap and easy?

So are the projected costs associated with the complexity of extraction from many source PST files or with TIFFing and Bates numbering or is it something I'm just too dense to appreciate?  [I've learned never to discount the last as a viable explanation...and neither should you.] 

Esteemed Reader--set me straight on this one please.  Maybe I'm just jaded.  750GB to process and 3,000 e-mails to produce sounds like an easy weekend.