It wasn't really ease of development, it was easier than the CELL, It's like being the the tallest sibling in a extremely short family, Even as the tallest you wouldn't be considered tall at 5 foot 6 inch.
Worse API support and it's a bigger crutch this time.
Last time the 360 RAM was at around 22 gb/s between RAM and GPU or something where as the PS3 has a bandwidth of essetially the same between GPU and RAM.
It was not a crutch last time, it was an advantage, now it must be used to to make up for the differences in the speed of the main memory, rather than just being used for the limited cases it was great for.