And I say again, that that is simply not true. There is no gigantic difference between techniques used forty years ago and those used today. They are simply faster, cheaper, and more widely applied. My major professor was good friends with an English scientist who moonlighted from his day job as a spectroscopist at a major instrument company to collaborate with the Metropolitan Museum of Art doing exactly this kind of stuff. He did fascinating slide shows of "hidden" versions of painted-over artwork revealed by non-destructive methods of analysis (in those days, done by neutron activation analysis).
I am old enough to have read of those and other advances in image analysis in Scientific American and elsewhere and to have studied their fruits in Art History in college.
The reason that the Wall Street Journal has written a story about the new imaging technology is that its cost and capability permit wide scale application to ancient manuscripts, often in remote locations. That has revolutionary consequences, just as the modern PC and jet airliners have revolutionary consequences that far eclipse their technological antecedents.