Hacking them was easy if you wanted to pirate, but during that time I don't think its the only reason. The games were huge DSL wasn't around in the PS1 days, PS2 yeah it was, and so was DC, but PS1 was more for region locked games like imported Japanese games. Running PS2 games off the HDD if you bought that was way faster, it was a legitimate reason to want to hack it even if you bought games. The size doesn't matter if you just used a reader and copied the discs, the PS3 was easier to use the onboard bluray to copy so you could it off the HDD, but I used hacks to use other branded controllers on the PS3 like on the USB ports. PS3 was somewhat piracy related but otherOS and homebrew matters more than you think, being able to run emulators on xbone in developer mode was enough to keep it from being hacked since you can run emulators on it, while the PS4 was hacked. The PS5 hardware is very attractive in the GPU shortage, and has very decent hardware for the price too.