Ahh, that would make sense; it didn’t occur to me to check the paper. I was mostly curious to see at a glance how it would visually compare with the addition of sharpening. Ultimately, it ends up looking pretty good.
Yes, and if you're comfortable pulling down the code and running 'make' on any *nix system, there is an executable 'resize_image' that lets you test it out for yourself. I'm always looking out for corner cases that stress-test the differences between the algorithms, so let me know if you find any good ones.