It was much easier to pirate games on the Dreamcast - the copy protection was broken to the degree that you could burn a game to a CD-R and have it Just Work without modifying the console in any way. It being both a total piracy free-for-all and also a catastrophic commercial failure doesn't seem to fit what you're saying.

Not to say that easy piracy is necessarily a death sentence for a console, the DS succeeded in spite of ubiquitous and cheap flashcarts, but the Dreamcast shows it's not necessarily a path to success either. There are just more pertinent reasons for a system to sink or swim.

I think that it was a game player and a DVD player had more to do with the success of the thing. Oh and it plays psx games too.

I owned both. The graphics/games were of similar quality. Having a larger game storage gave the ps2 a decent advantage. The dreamcast seemed more interesting. But the PS2 had a better customer feature set.

In models built prior October 2000 - it was very easy, just boot up Utopia loader and then you were able to run any game from CD.

Lol what? You got it the other way around. Also out of the dozen or so friends in my friend group who had a PS2, none of us had a modded PS2 or pirated games.

The PS2 was popular on its own and it wasn't related to piracy.

What are you talking about? The Dreamcast didn't even have adequate copy protection. I switched my entire collection to backups at some point to preserve the integrity of the original discs.