How exactly is their relationship with Sony relevant to the development of their own tools? Naughty Dog have a history of handling the development on their own, prime example being Andy Gavin's custom programming languages and their console implementations. Besides, whether you're a first, second or third party developer, Sony doesn't want your game to suck if it's going to be published on their console. What you're saying sounds like there's a special support service for second party developers, which supplies them with the latest tricks, all ready to go.
What I meant to point out was that early PlayStation games didn't amaze. Saturn always gets labelled as the superior 2D console, and its 3D is always panned, but like I said, it wasn't all home runs for PlayStation, either. People laugh at
Jaguar's Cybermorph, but guess what? That's what you get when you're releasing new technology, and there are no experienced developers around, because it's the first time for everyone, and you have to learn as you go. PlayStation got
Total Eclipse Turbo, which admittedly looked better, but was released much later and on a superior hardware, but who cares about all that, when you can compare Saturn's infancy with PlayStation's best and greatest.
I don't want this to become a rant about which console is better, etc. It's not about specs. It's about Sega not being able to secure their position on the market, yet again. Anyway, there are plenty of interesting titles for the Saturn, and a good game is still a good game, no matter how many polygons it's trying to push.