given the popularity of everdrives, i don’t think most people play on original hardware for the sake of using original copies. using original hardware gets around potential inaccuracies and/or performance issues with emulation. the Saturn is particularly prone to these issues because of it’s complex architecture- despite being more powerful, Dreamcast emulators tend to run much better than Saturn emulators just because there are way less moving parts
i agree with a lot of what you’re saying- i kept the original shell and disc drive on my Saturn personally and just use a pseudosaturn for playing imports and backups. i was just answering fishos’ question of why bother with original hardware if you’re not using original discs