There's another reason why these games weren't ported to home consoles: hardware. The arcade hardware of the day was leagues more advanced than anything we had at home. Even ports like TMNT: Turtles in Time suffered massive downgrades to bring it to home releases.
I will say, though. The choice of porting to the Saturn is both ambitious and incredibly smart. The Saturn excelled in rendering sprite based games. It was also a nightmare to work with due to it's haphazard architecture. But it looks good so far! Hopefully this can get off the ground...
Oh yeah, definitely agree, there would have had to be more than a few concessions made to get this working on the 16-Bit platforms of the time. I figure by the time Saturn and PlayStation were popular the licenses for Simpsons and X-Men may have expired so Konami could not port them without paying up again.
I know the developer behind this is using a 2D/3D development kit for Saturn (I was not even aware there was one) to help facilitate working around the complexity of the hardware. If it can help developers make great games I am all for it.