Blu ray codecs. AVC vs. VC1. Which one is better?

I've been watching latelly some early releases from Warner Bros. and Universal on BD, which used the VC1 codec for video. I remember there was talking some years ago that VC1 was inferior to AVC, that VC1 uses to soften picture and was only efficient on low data rates (as with HD-DVD, many early Warner HD-DVD and BD shared the same encode) but AVC renders more picture quality and that's why VC1 was almost abandoned.
Your opinion on this subject?

 

http://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=142009

I pulled up Google and came across this ^ thread. It has a good wealth of information on the topic. It sounds like a lot of folks there say AVC is superior, but I guess it would depend on if each was used to its fullest potential.

All but two of my Harry Potter Blu-ray discs are encoded with VC-1 and I never got the feeling they looked bad.

 

I believe AVC is the newer codec, but I would bet it matters more about bitrate and how efficiently and accurately the codec is done. I can recall a time when Blu-ray was first introduced that it took 72 hours to do a first-pass encode of a Blu-ray disc, then another 24 hours for a second pass (lightening up on the compression that created visual flaws in the first pass). Now, they can do the whole thing in 12 hours with very little human intervention necessary, and the encoding is better.

Now that studios are routinely using dual-layer 50GB discs, I don't think bitrate is as much of a problem as it was before. If they encode most of the movie at 25Mbps+, it's gonna look great no matter what they use. 40Mbps is the theoretical limit, as I recall.