http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/14/sega-satur...
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/14/sega-satur...
Funnily enough we see Sony repeat the same mistake in the PS3, doubling down on a chip architecture aimed at parallelism (cell), while most developers expressed frustration adapting.
Didn't really hurt Sony in the big picture though as much as it hurt SEGA. By the time SEGA got so much right in the Dreamcast era, they were already swimming upstream thanks to the ground they lost with the Saturn.
This was another reason they got lots of flame with the PS3, as not only was it hard to program for, the SDK wasn't that great.
Hence why they spent around two years time bringing out a great graphics debugger developed with input of teams like the Gran Turism one, and a middleware for prototyping ideas, PyreEngine.
Years later Sonic Team released SGL 2.0, a much nicer high level C API which showed the true potential of the Saturn, but it was too late to claw back the lead Sony had built up.