Is remastered mainly just less jitter?

I once attended a panel discussion where the "loudness wars" came up and one of the panel members, a mastering engineer said that if you wanted to get mastering work, you had to compress dynamic range.

It seems like the "loudness wars" may be taking some pause, hopefully more and more music will be mastered in the future with better dynamic range...

" "Dark Side of the Moon ... there is one VERY famous remaster that totally kills it dynamically and sound effects-wise"

is that the one Barry Diament did? "

I believe you are referring to the remaster that Tim from EAR did as one of the first recordings used to market SACD. Personally, I never cared for it. Very boring to listen to. All the life was sucked out of it.

Jitter is not only an issue of the playback but recording (digitizing) as well.  The difference is that playback jitter can be suppressed while recording jitter cannot be removed and the only way to improve it is to digitize it again from analog tapes (if they still exist) with better more stable A/D converters (clocks). Some early master tapes were digitized poorly, but there are many other reasons for remastering.  DSD, SACD, can only be mastered after conversion to 24/192, AFAIK.

"...the really early masters for CD are poor.."

Unless I’m not reading the numbers right, but looking at the DR values this theory doesn’t seem to hold up. There are lots of early 80’s CDs that are much better than then their later counterparts. I expected the opposite. Interestingly enough, many of the "popular" music like Beyonce, etc., have real low DR values. This supports the theory around the quality of (compressed) sound geared towards the ear-bud/mobile user community.

I have heard a number of remasters that are definitely not improvements over previous masters. So frequently the term remaster simply means crap shoot.
On the other hand remasters can improve things immensely, the Beatles and Springsteen catalogs are good examples.
I have no way of knowing if jitter plays a role in either scenario.