Okay, its taken me a while, and I still can't fill in Rick's other two
blanks. Nobody seems interested in this "recent" stuff...enough talk about
it in a book that's handy on a shelf, anyway.

However, I found some additional interesting hints to answer Ron's question
about why the Feds would forbid the return and resale of bottles.

It seems the Prohibition forces that were still alive and kicking out there
in 1933 were terribly afraid of the saloon. It was the biggest bugaboo of
all. (All those working class men getting together, plotting the overthrow
of the captains of industry, keeping good money out of the hands of their
starving wives and children, public drunkeness, you know the story....).The
saloon was one of the major reasons we had Prohibition to begin with. The
partnerships between the saloons and the breweries made the saloons just
that much more powerful. When Prohibition was repealed, it was firmly
believed that the saloon must never be allowed to exist again, at least in
the way it had, and the unholy alliance between the saloons and breweries
must be broken. Price gouging and price fixing that went along with this
alliance was just one of the evils; there were many more.

What has this got to do with bottles? Well, during Prohibition, people
(working class people) became used to drinking at home, privately, not in
public or socially in a saloon (my sources did not address the speakeasies,
because this was the middle class and the elite). At home, you do not use a
keg, you use a bottle. The theory was, if the federal government encouraged
bottled liquor sales by means of lower tax rates as opposed to kegs with
high tax rates, then they encouraged off-site (at home) drinking. No public
drunkeness, ergo no drinking problems. Killing the bottle after it was used
ensured that each bottle was correctly taxed and therefore controlled.

Somehow this tactic was also gauged to cut the tie between the saloons and
the breweries, although I am unclear on how that happened. Bottling and
competition may have been the driving force here, because before
prohibition, most saloons were "sponsored" by a brewery. Before 1918,
saloons sold that one brand on draught and "imports" from its bottles
(although these "imports" were not true imports, simply products brought in
from some other location). Perhaps by encouraging bottle sales, the feds
hoped to discourage these unholy alliances and encourage competition.

Sources for this information are:

Blocker, Jack S.
      1989  American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform. Twayne, Boston
(pages 133-139).

Baron, Stanley
      1962  Brewed in America: A History of Beer and Ale in the United
States. Little, Brown. Boston (pp 323-329).