Perhaps by fooling around with the quality slider and target bitrates, etc., (or by using a better Cinepak encoder than the one bundled with MoviePlayer 2.5), I could achieve a very different result.

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I don't think the Cinepak codec has changed at all since Quicktime 2.5. MoviePlayer is just the front-end. If you use MoviePak or Cleaner, it still uses Quicktime's Cinepak encoder, but gives you some additional options for changing the video before sending it to the encoder. Some options are variable frame rate (dropping duplicate frames) and adaptive noise reduction. From my experience, using QuickTime Player with QuickTime 7 Pro produces identical results as using MoviePlayer with Quicktime 2.5.

The biggest differences come with changing the data rate. Also, the consensus from long ago was that the Spatial and Temporal Quality should both be set to Best when encoding with Cinepak at a specified data rate. (Hold the Option key down to change the slider to Temporal.)