For one, the shifter cannot morph to anyone at his leisure - just the opponent. That is sorta beside the point though, as from a technical standpoint the morph the shifter does have practically nothing in common with morphs in the actual game. The shifters' morph simply consists of the shifter's model being replaced with the opponent's 3d model (which is already in memory). However, if you'd want to morph when in a fight, the game would have to load not only the actual model, but animations, sounds and code, too. The bulk of the loading time before any given match is the loading of character data - If a character was to be able to morph into anyone during a fight, you'd have to let the game load 1/3 to 1/2 of the time it takes to load the match, and just as long again when/if the morph 'expires'. Even if the loading time would be considerably shorter - say 3 seconds or so - it's still enough to be annoying, and eventually most people would simply not want to bother with morphing at all. I know I didn't in the PSX versions of MK3 and MKT at least...

I'd love to be proven wrong - but at this point I doubt something like this would be possible on PS2.

I think the HDD for both the Xbox and Ps2 are the answer to that, just the ps2 didn't come with the HDD(you have to buy it) so we all suffer.

It if loaded all the characters,sounds,etc when booting up the game, there should be no loading what so ever. But because ps2 and xbox don't both have HDD(only xbox does)they wouldn't even consider that and idea, because there would be alot of problems from certain non HDD ps2 owners.