1. Pop in and LOD troubles are tightly coupled with cpu performance, NOT with ssd

2. Spiderman profits a lot from more memory and much better cpu than from ssd.

It's cool to have an ssd, but it would help absolutely nothing without the cpu and memory upgrades.

You missed the must important video

because Spiderman is a Sony game, so they were able to get the devs to whip up a demo and make sure it's running as intended/doesn't encounter bugs

additionally Insomniac held an hour long presentation at GDC earlier in the year, which mainly focusses on how the HDD speed was a major obstacle they had to work around https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDhKyIZd3O8

While there are some who use patching as a cop out it's not all negative, as to buggy games pre patch there were plenty but since the world was less connected you didn't have  the awareness that you have today or the critical audience feedback,I started gaming on a secondhand C64 moved onto Amiga then PC and consoles, so I have been gaming for over 30 years and I recall bugs ranging from nuisance value up to game breaking ever since I started, now whether it is worse or better today, I don't know.

What I do know that the more complex the system the more things can go wrong and with today's games becoming more complex as well as more open and less linear, the chances of bugs have increased, the numbers of bug testers you see in game credits is a testament to that, the response of using day one patches and patching when necessary to fix the problem seems to me to be driven by publishers preferring not to hold back releases when a day one patch will do the job.

I have seen toy story lately.  The textures aren't as good, but the animation is still better.  And the lighting and shadows. But I'm not going to get into a whole thing about it.  Point is that the PS2 wasn't even near that level. 

Because I see that Toy Story 'quote' brought up from time-to-time, I'll leave the source here with the actual words that sparked this, which came from a journalist, not Sony (I discovered it in '06, just prior to the PS3's launch)

http://money.cnn.com/1999/03/01/life/playstation/

I honestly can't remember many major releases back in the day suffering from major game breaking glitches.  Even up to the Wii, where Nintendo didn't really patch stuff.  There were some odd things here and there that activated in weird circumstances, (like something in Skyward Sword if you talked to a particular NPC at a weird point where you probably wouldn't) but I can't recall that many truly bugged out games.  

Obviously patches could be a good thing, but the original point that was brought up still stands.  I can still to this day bust out my SNES and play my favorite games.  What happens in a couple of decades when patches are not supported, I don't have access to a patched system, or deleted the data due to limited hard drive space years ago, and I want to play a game that was reliant on a day one patch?  This trend is fine for now, but its very not future proof.