I'm not being sarcastic here, but this isn't surprising and really my typical experience. Most people did not play Dreamcast at the time and teched straight to Smash Melee and MGS2, considering DC only in retrospect, familiarizing themselves with Youtube videos, ports, remasters and emulators. I beat Sonic Adventure before 9/9/99 on a rental Dreamcast by leaving the system on between sessions because Hollywood Video did not provide a VMU to save for their exclusive pre-launch promo; I was keenly aware of its massive upgrade from 64/PS, and directly compared newer systems to it, because I'd been playing it for two years. Most people hadn't.
It's a good point and I get it. All systems definitely had standouts; like I said they were very asymmetric which resulted in differing results, somewhat like SNES/Genesis. PS2 surely had graphical standout games that were no slouches. That said, as a layman teenager, by and large I got the impression Dreamcast had made it easier for devs to give us cleaner looking games, even when they were lower budget whatever-tier games. It seemed like it took an act of God to defeat the fugly jaggy look on PS2. Even crappy DC titles tended to have a crisp, clean presentation. Demo disk games like Toy Commander made it seem like devs could just press a button to defeat the horrific aliasing and bad framerates of last gen. One example I can give is that back then I thought GTA3 looked jaggy, smeary and chugged. Sure it was new innovative and open-world, but coming from Crazy Taxi which was bright, colorful, clean, crisp and gave you a city to drive in and usually hit 60fps I was like...is that it? This is the best game???
This is where your point of preferences is valid, and I'm certain GTA3 had much more going on under the hood straining the system than Crazy Taxi did to DC (c'mon I'm not stupid). Nonetheless it just seemed like DC did more, with less. Such as Gamecube, or these days, Switch.
Back then, on a real CRT using real consoles. I don't think it was that flattering to PS2 to play its big games directly after Dreamcast with a copy of Sonic, Soul Calibur, Crazy Taxi and a few demo disks. Especially when it came out 2 years later. Of course there are exceptions but you have jaggy heaven compared to a system that you wanted to connect to a computer monitor even on its "low tier" titles. The even bigger problem than the smeary screen though was the bad controller, which is also preference, but that really killed the system for me, which sucks because the game library is epic. I was devastated that they didn't update it for PS3, boomerang controller might actually have been better lol.