to seeing Dreamcast's "thicker density" CDs being converted to a normal 80min CDR format

This could have been easially avoided if Sega had ensured the system only booted from their GD-ROM disks (Gigabyte Disc). Basicially someone figures out the Dreamcast would read a normal CD with no complaints, and then hacked the GD-Rom in the Dreamcast to spit the data out to a computer. From there people have either just burned it to a CD with a new boot program to support this, or they had to actually either remove or compress content to get it to fit onto a CD. Very interesting how this happened. Had they ensured the disc was checked at hardware level, they would have avoided much of the piracy that occurs on the Dreamcast, since many people are willing to burn a CD and stick it in, but not too many want to crack open their system and install a mod chip.