Yep, I understand it was a Trojan horse tactic to make sure HD-DVD didn’t take off but most people had just gotten DVD players in the early 2000s and HDTV adoption rates were still low so people just weren’t ready for Blu-Ray in 2006/2007 when PS3 launched. They could have done a mid-gen upgrade in 2009/2010 that included Blu-Ray when prices came down.

As for sales, I agree, a cheaper PS3 likely would have had minimal impact on Wii but 360 would have definitely taken a big hit. I still think PS3 would have done worse than PS2 as Microsoft was making some good moves with 360 to build off of Xbox and Wii was now the hit casual console. Im guessing the PlayStation/Xbox split would have been similar to PS4/XBO with Wii selling basically the same.

I find PS3 the second best console of its generation, PSP being the first. But I agree it's the weakest Sony home console system mostly because I'm not a fan of this generation games 

PS5 so far has been amazing. It's everything I could ask for a console. Run pretty games at 60 FPS and 1080 HD, could carry my PS4 library without many problems, good network for multi-player, many good games that go on sale pretty often, many physical games as well. Very fast load times. And the dualsense is the best controller ever made, I'm so used to the haptics it just feels like what a proper controller should be. 

It's just way too expensive, specially for a Brazilian. Series S is a much better offer when it comes to pricing, less than half of PS5 (you can go as far as finding them being sold to 35% of PS5 price)

Add in using a more normal processor instead of Cell and you're looking at 100 million+ I think. 

Microsoft and Nintendo were stiff direct and indirect competition, so I don't think it could've touched the PS2. It probably wouldn't even surpass the PS4. 

Yeah I think Microsoft was going to see growth from Xbox to 360 regardless of PS3 price. The combination of the one year head start, superior online service, bigger 1st party games, securing some big timed exclusives and former PS exclusives going multiplat were bound to give the brand momentum in the early part of the generation and cause a decent amount of PS2 owners to migrate. Then later in the generation it had the big boost from Kinect.

As for Wii affecting it, I think a lot of people underestimate how many casual gamers were on PS2, you don’t sell over 150 million units of hardware without a sizable casual audience. It wasn’t as dominant of an audience as it was on Wii but you had franchises like Guitar Hero, Dance Dance Revolution, SingStar, Buzz! and a bunch of licensed kid properties selling millions of units on PS2 and Eyetoy sold over 10 million so it definitely wasn’t exclusively for “hardcore” gamers.

I agree with 159.2M sold for PS2 but I think it's rather interesting that Sony declares that every console has "More than..." in their official Worldwide sell-in. 
Makes me think "how much more" for some of these.
Thankfully VGChartz does a great job on data, we get a good solid idea, based on facts, mathematics, and hard work.

Sony's comment on lower PS3 revenue was attributed to lower pricing not to lower shipments nor unit sales. We cannot assume based on this comment from Sony that the PS3 sold less or stayed flat compared to previous year.

If we want to go super crazy, we could find out how much the PS3 was in every country during the previous year mentioned, and their final year. And from there calculate how many PS3 were sold, then subtract that from the 16.5M to get PS2.

That is gonna be a lot of work, and already feels exhausting typing this up (hahaha).
But that would be how I determine the numbers to be honest.