With the possibility of assigning adjacent digital RF channels (instead of spacing them 6 channels apart like in the analog days), there's as much room on Channels 14-36 as there was on 14-69 in the analog days. The days of translators on Channels 70-83 came and went fairly quickly, and there were never many full-powered stations in that segment, even in the 1950s.
Back in the earliest days of TV, if UHF had possessed tuning parity with VHF, it's hard telling how many TV markets would have sprung up, in fact, if I'm understanding the situation correctly, the expectation was that many smaller communities would also have TV stations, and I'm not sure anyone sat down and thought of, for instance (using South Carolina as an example), a Columbia market, a Camden-Sumter market, a Myrtle Beach-Georgetown market, a Florence market, and so on. Except in the larger cities, I'm not sure that network affiliations were a well-thought-out thing either. The more "democratic" --- for lack of a better word --- approach would have been to do away with VHF TV all together, reassign those frequencies to an expanded FM radio band, public safety, utilities, and so on, and make all TV UHF in a 70-channel universe. Even 70 channels would have been oceans of spectrum, and making TV UHF-only might have acted as a driver to develop detent tuners and suitable antennas sooner than they were. With the advent of digital, and more efficient use of spectrum for subchannels, then, as you point out, reducing the number of channels might have been entirely feasible. What concerns me nowadays is all of the short-spacing, and creating reception problems that would be obviated even if the UHF band went from channels 14 through 51, let alone 69 or even 83. I have one station here in Columbia (WZRB-47) that is very difficult to get --- I have to position my antenna just-so --- because it shares OTA channel 25 with stations in Charlotte and Charleston. I have a pet theory that the short-spacing is going to make getting TV from distant markets much more difficult than it otherwise would be --- two equidistant, or nearly enough so, stations playing thumb-war with one another ends up cancelling out both. I even have to wonder if this is partially by design, to force viewers to watch one market and one market only, something that definitely serves the interests of local broadcasters. Local advertisers want you watching their ads, not the ads for the next market over, someplace you might either never go for shopping, etc., or on the other hand, someplace you might come to
prefer going to, instead of keeping your business local. There are far more products and services available in Charlotte than there are in Florence or even Columbia. People in someplace such as Portsmouth, Ohio, can get to Columbus about as easily as they can get to Charleston, West Virginia, with the added fillip of its being a much larger city, more interesting place to shop, visit, dine, and so on, and being in the same state on top of that. Charleston might as well be in a foreign country to viewers in Portsmouth, or even Ashland or Ironton for that matter.
