Yep, that is a case I accept a claim of lazyness, because it would take 1 person just some hours to do it... They could also do that even on the cartridge if you are buying a USA version.

The thing is, it depended on the game. There were games that needed installs, and others that didn't.

Games with a considerable small size didn't need to be installed, yeah. As a downside, then you had things like MGS4, which required installation...of each independent chapter.

Unlike PS3 games, which required installation as a general measure, 360 games were almost entirely optional in regards of installation aside from The Evil Within and GTA V, which are the two only games I know that require to be installed.

But even games like God of War III didn't need installation. It depended on the game itself, installs were not mandatory for many games.

Halo 4 required an install for multiplayer. It was so inconvenient because I got the 4GB xbox 360 and had to get a seperate usb for it

Which can only be possible with a focus on optimization, yeah. Final Fantasy XIII didn't have to be installed either despite being a massive game in size because they tackled loading times pretty much early in development, and did their best so that load times weren't a problem at all. But then you have things like Yakuza 4 or Devil May Cry having around 20 minutes of mandatory install, on the other hand. Just because there's a few shining examples that speak more on how commendable some developers can be at times doesn't mean that ultimately Blu-Ray is heavily oriented for installation (and most of the PS3 catalogue can attest that), and not even the PS3 Slim revision could help with this much. The increased size aspect of games nowadays pretty much void any hope that blu-rays don't require installation anymore, which brings us to the thing that developers truly don't go for a great optimization even if they could.

It didn't depend on the game itself as much as it depended on how much data was being held inside the Blu-Ray and how much emphasis the developer gave to that aspect.

Didn't remember that, but then again never bothered with the multiplayer aspect of Halo 4. I guess that makes it three games.

In general? Not much, its tech is quite tame for a retail PS4 title (R&C is far more impressive). Relative to the average Nintendo title and in the context of a storage discussion? Its textures are significantly more detailed, its environments are more geometrically complex, and it spends 15 hours rapidly discarding those environments and their assets.

Tropical Freeze is almost twice the size of SMO. Did Nintendo forget to tell Nintendo how to compress? Was everyone off sick and the janitor forced to do it? Or is this discussion perhaps more complex than the "Nintendo good, all others bad" narrative you've attempted to cocoon yourself in?

It should also be noted that saying stuff like "ABC has much better [x asset] than the average Nintendo title" isn't a criticism again said Nintendo title. The PS4 is literally several times stronger than even a docked Switch, and for fairly obvious reasons. Even a shitty developer can quite easily match the average asset quality of a Nintendo title on the PS4, because they have far more wiggle room. Said texture will, however, look worse because that's Nintendo's strength: They make lesser assets look better than most others can. Making something look nicer than it normally should doesn't make the asset file larger though.

On PS3 it was said to be a fault of the single or 2x speed of the BD drive.

Perhaps after seeing most gamers are ok with install times and that they would save money on games being on the HDD instead of putting better drives (which also increase the life of the console) coupled with the patch hungry state of games Sony and MS didn't bothered anymore for this gen and gone further making all games full installs.

If I had to take a wild guess, better drives would make both consoles' price go up dramatically, which is simply unviable.

The biggest difference is texture quality, as I said in my first response to you. Nintendo games famously use really vibrant colors on really simple textures. Odyssey also has pretty low poly models and almost no AA. Which is why even in the 1080p screenshot I posted the game has a lot of jagged edges.

Compared to Odyssey Crash has a much higher level of detail, which is most easily seen in the plants, and in Crash himself (who actually has a fur shader). The lighting is way more advanced and reacts to different objects dynamically and there are actual light shafts present in the game. The game also features a way more robust level of AA. Add to that the fact that it's pixel count is more than 2.5 times that of Odyssey and I don't think it's hard to see where the extra size comes from.

A Hat In Time hasn't even been officially announced for the Switch yet. Comparing a game made by at most a few dozen people that's designed to support super high resolutions and levels of AA to an up-resed version of a GameCube game made by one of the largest video game companies in the world is apples and oranges.