Saturn was a 2D POWERHOUSE, but def lacked the 3D the PS1 could do. Perhaps it was their two co-processors (apply named Tom and Jerry) that made it hard to program for?!
Lots of reasons for Saturn's difficult-to-program nature (with most devs; some like Treasure apparently loved it and thought it was easier to code for than N64)
1: Dual SH2s in a master-slave mode where both had to share the same bus, leading to bus contention and one SH2 needing to wait for the other to finish accessing the bus
2: The SCU (which connected to multiple (3) chips) having a super-complex DSP for its time that was poorly documented. Also couldn't access external WRAM-L, so only had its internal SRAM cache and WRAM-H to work with. WRAM-H was faster than WRAM-L, but only half the total WRAM in the system.
3: VPD 1 having two discrete framebuffer RAM pools (rather than one larger, contiguous pool)
4: Saturn's use of forward texture mapping (resulted in excess of drawn pixels, wasting bandwidth), which wasn't great for 3D in particular
5: The setup of VDP1 & VDP2 making it very hard to do transparency on 3D games
6: Very "poor" dev tools and support early on. Documentation existed for almost all of the system components (tho SCU documentation was lacking), but the early SDK environment was way behind PS1's. SEGA also didn't work well with 3P who were working with their own IP, i.e refusing to provide Time Warner with Virtua Racing source code for their Saturn version of that game.
7: Saturn's use of quads vs. triangles, meaning all polygons had one additional vertex to calculate for. This is also partly what contributed to making 3D transparencies difficult.
8: No hardware-based Z-buffering, although the PS1 lacked this as well. Still though, Sony provided more robust tools to address these types of things, whereas on Saturn, most of the time devs had to go at it alone.
Now for my personal experience...I never had a Saturn back when it was on the market. My dad got me a Genesis in '95, that was my first console as a kid (otherwise I played some stuff in arcades sporadically prior to that). In '98, got a PS1 and then a N64. Although I had magazines that talked about the Saturn, it just seemed like a super "hardcore" system and many of the games I read about weren't in the same style of games I had been playing on my Genesis.
Also prior to getting a PS1, I played PS1 at my friend's house in the neighborhood (hope you're well, Danny!). Playing stuff like Tekken and DBZ (I was super-big into DBZ back then, well before Toonami brought it on), and realizing no such games were on Saturn (later I'd learn Saturn did get Dragonball games, but none of them were localized)...well, made it easy for me to pick PS1.
Of course nowadays, I've been playing tons of Saturn stuff and I'd have to say some of my favorite games ever, like the Shining Force III series, are Saturn games. I don't know if I would've appreciated them, or the system, as a kid back in the day though, so maybe it's a good thing I didn't get into its library until I got older.
EDIT:
MrCunningham
The PS1 doesn't have a sprite engine, traditionally speaking. It doesn't have hardware support for tiles and such the way Saturn does. Instead, programmers just made quads out of joining two triangles, applied textures on them, and rendered everything to a single flat layer.
Damn the PlayStation Tax™ was real even back in 1995!!