PS2 was the tail end of the bespoke hardware, and Sony gave their chips very marketing names, but I don’t remember the hardware being especially strange. The SDK being ass would be a different issue.
The PS2 was infamous to develop for. Most of the bottleneck came from the vector units. Most middleware eventually made working around the strange hardware much easier.
When asked if they were weary about developing on PS2, due to its reputation of it being tough to code for, Sega devs famously laughed and replied that they already mastered the Saturn - how much harder could it get?
