At that time in 2011, yes - Carl Zeiss, who remained so until they capitalized themselves into 'ZEISS' not realising no one would ever inflict their brand name on each other in that textual form, was entering the 'unleaded fuel' era of substandard replacements for the magic of lead and trying to remain relevant with the impoverished glass selections left to them from the decimated Schott catalog.
So that was the upheaval's core issue. Zeiss themselves now acknowledge the superiority of the CY optics, in their release statement of the new Aatma cine lens range. When asked 'why not just reissue CY lenses', they said they were prohibited from using lead.
Zeiss also had the misfortune of losing their way in the post-Contax period, in terms of the first advanced (heavily revised) T* coatings used in both the CY and Super Speed lenses. It's been downhill ever since, as makers resorted to APD glass and hoodwinked all and sundry into believing sharpness was all that mattered. And coatings became correction entities in their own right.
Nobody in the know is fooled. The Super Speeds share glass formulae, coatings and design methodologies with the CY lenses, not what followed - CZ went a similar way in cine lenses: more sharpness! Lead was crucial in permitting such simple spherical lenses (6-8 elements in the main) to perform so well, particularly their treatment of image depth, saturation and skin tones. The cine people know all this, but it does not compute in stills land.
'Super Speeds Sets (MKII / MKIII, 5-lens set: 18, 25, 35, 50, 85mm):Very good condition sets routinely trade around $35,000 to $50,000 USD, though pristine or expanded sets with the rare 135mm T2.1 can push past $68,000 to $75,000 USD.'
And full credit to Schott's Peter Hartmann (https://spie.org/profile/Peter.Hartmann-13859) who tried for years to convince the dopes in Brussels of the error of their ways. Besides consumer optics, there was much more at stake in very important high tech fields - it actually threatened to disable MRI machines because they lost the ability to image the blue channel.
