Or maybe they were more readily available.
By "readily available" do you mean easier to find in the archives?
We all should be thankful we didn't get the dreadful syndication cuts. We'd miss a huge chunk of episodes, and we wouldn't have any of the U.S. Acres shorts. I think, like a couple Binky shorts are still missing, but we've got most of the series in tact.
Yeah, if they used the syndication cuts, the original opening and first few closings would have been missing. I wonder if any of the main Garfield or U.S. Acres segments were shortened in syndication.
For years I thought it was just the last season that was not in syndication, but after looking at
wrongepedia wikipedia I saw that it was more than just the last season: The last two seasons, the last half of the fifth season, and some of season four. I know that the later episodes weren't included in the syndication package because CBS had broadcasting rights to those episodes at the time, but I wonder why some of the season four episodes were left out (assuming wikipedia isn't wrong about that).
I know that after CBS' contract ran out that the syndicator was offered the remaining Garfield episodes but chose not to. I'm guessing that's the case with other animated shows that are incomplete in syndication (the networks had exclusive rights to certain episodes, and the syndicators didn't want to pay for additional episodes when the rights ended), but this doesn't seem to be a problem with live-action shows. It seems like when live-action shows enter syndication, the current season enters the syndication package after the new season starts. So why do current episodes of live-action shows eventually enter syndication while current episodes of animated shows don't?