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I'm a game developer/programmer, and have been making games for about 15 years. I've made both PS1 and PS2 games.
There can be alot of work involved in converting NTSC to PAL.
for a start, all of your menu screens dont fit anymore, they are the wrong size. So you need 2 sets of artwork, one for each screen size.
All your screen layouts for icons and text will be in different positions, and will need to be edited.
IF the game was originally intended for 1 territory, then you might be stuck right there allready. e.g. If you have a full screen menu picture...hand drawn 8 months ago.... how do you draw an extra 100 lines or artwork at the bottom.... you can't.
It has to be planned at the start of the project. all the art needs to be generated to work on PAL
I am guessing some games with "black borders" were such projects
There IS a hardware performance problem with NTSC to PAL PS2 conversions, you only have a certain amount of video memory in which to fit all your graphics on PS2.
Note that this memory also includes the screen (not just textures)!!! So if you change to a PAL sized screen buffer. then the space for your textures just got smaller, then not all your textures fit into memory any more, which means you either need alot more data handling to swap textures in and out of memory on the fly 50 times a second, which will slow your game down. Or you have to shrink the textures so they will fit into video memory, which is alot of work, and makes your textures look more blurry.
There is usually plenty of work involved. in converting to PAL
Don't blame the developer, blame the publisher.. the developer only does what the publisher pays them to do.
Publishers want lots of quality, but never want to pay for it, heh heh
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