Ah, fair enough, thanks.

Did you think stuff like Uncharted/Killzone/Wipeout were up to standard, but then support dried up, or did they never quite hit the bar in your view?

Wipeout 2048 is great and Gravity Rush and Tearaway were good games and showed off the Vita's hardware in the same way Nintendo games show off their gimmicks in fun ways. Sony just gave up.

Except for Wipeout, all the other iterations of PS franchises felt like lesser versions of the home consoles releases. This was also true for many third party exclusive games (Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty, etc). It was not like Nintendo handhelds whose games just had different approaches rather than being "the same as home console, but smaller and worse". In fact, PS Vita shone the most with their purely handheld games, like Gravity Rush, Tearaway, etc.

Even games that should have had more or less parity with the home console release like the HD releases played and looked MUCH worse than on PS3 (Jak & Daxter Collection being the worst offender of this. I'm still disappointed at how bad they screwed this one up).

More than "giving up", Sony just fundamentally misunderstood what kind of games they should make. They promised home console tier gaming on the go, but they knew they didn't have the hardware for that yet, nor the budget for making both big games on home console and on the go. That's why they made poor man versions of Uncharted, Killzone, Resistance, etc.

Never wanted one.

I think they were fine...but Sony can't support their consoles on 1st party content alone, and apart from few games from 3rd party AAA publishers that really felt like console games on the go, they didn't manage to attract enough support (like they did with GTA Liberty City Stories for PSP for example) - not to mention they've abandoned it themselves fairly quickly.

Not that I think Vita would be (due to general decline in handheld market) hugely more successful even if did have all the necessary support (maybe 10M more?), but its library would be much richer with content it was advertised for.

Alrighty, so you'd consider it good hardware, but a bad system overall due to its library, am I interpreting correctly?

As I initially said, software wise, it was more than fine as indie/small games handheld, but its library failed in what it was advertised as, AAA console gaming on the go, which I think it could've been given the quite powerful hardware and few games of that scope that actually pushed it in that direction.

I beat both uncharted and Killzone on vita when they were released. For handhelds back then I found them to be phenomenal. Graphics were great and especially the OLED Display made them look good. Both were ofcourse not as good as the ps3 games but for that time i did not really expect more.
Ultimately the handheld did not meet my expectations since to few games released that did really interest me and at that time i was really busy playing all the ps3 and Xbox games and halo 3 multiplayer. I did use the remote play sometimes but always disliked the dpads.

Interesting that you disliked the d-pad. I never tried a Vita myself but its d-pad is generally viewed as one of the best ever. Conversely, DualSense's is often considered Playstation's worst (I agree).

I'll vouch for Vita having one of the best D-Pads ever. I'm talking the OLED model, I don't have the Slim. I've never used a PSP, but Vita's D-Pad is the best PlayStation has made. Vita's small size and top-tier D-Pad make it one of the most comfortable platforms to play 2D games on. If it had a bigger or more memorable library, it probably would be the best.