Time zones are aligned to population centers as much as they are political boundaries.
For example, this methodology would probably cut major US cities in half. It’s hard to tell exactly, but some cities would be Phoenix, the whole metropolitan corridor of Oklahoma City to San Antonio, Salt Lake City, and Detroit. In Canada, Edmonton and Calgary stand out.
This post doesn’t include everything. There were a variety of hardware revisions and price cuts that you could add in. Plus the change of the price of games and accessories.
I waited until 2011 to get my PS3. It was $150 for a slim model, and I chose the Uncharted 3 bundle for $200. I think it ended up being a pretty good deal. You mentioned Blu-Ray and DVD, but it was also good for a lot of streaming services. The PS3 pre-dated the rise of smart TV’s. I don’t think there were even Android boxes back then- the NVIDIA Shield and Amazon Fire Stick were both released in 2014, and the Chromecast was 2013. Media PC’s were a lot less common, and so were couch-friendly operating systems.
Unrelated- the Deck is amazing. With PS1 and PS2 it’s really easy to rip your games on a PC and emulate them on the Deck. And with widescreen hacks, cheats, texture packs, save states, speed up, and slow down, plus the extra buttons to control it all, it’s even better than original hardware. PS3 is doable too, though there’s a lot more hoops to jump through and fewer emulation benefits. You can also use Chiaki to stream from your PS4/5, so it’s pretty close to having the whole library in the palm of your hands.