I'm pretty sure Yamaguchi was behind the decision to use carts if I remember correctly. It wasn't the fact that carts were "faster" that made Nintendo go with them; Nintendo didn't want to close its cart manufacturing plant.

Absolutely! The "faster" line was just a ridiculous excuse. I always felt that Nintendo thought it could charge large prices for carts and get away with it. Maybe I'm just being cynical...

What I read was that they wanted to retain control of the production and carts allowed them to do that. They were also concerned about software piracy, which was pretty standard for CD's. They just got blindsided by the swift move that 3rd parties made from Nintendo carts to Playstation/Saturn CD's (I believe a cart added $10 to the production costs, a CD was like $1 or less). The lack of load times is a minor bonus (but lets also be real...I don't think anyone misses the long load times of PS1/Saturn games)

Using carts didn't stop piracy on the GBA (which was so prevalent it was ridiculous) but comparing that to the N64 is apple and oranges due to the difference in time periods.

I'm curious though... did the use of carts really curb piracy on the 64?

This was in the planning stages, before they had to deal with live emulators of the system. Once those were out, it was a simply matter of finding ROM images and how powerful your PC was. I don't think GBA was particularly hard to emulate. DS was another story because of the second screen, but flash carts solved that problem.

In any case, burning CD-R's and modding your system was still easier even in the mid-90's. Nintendo's logic was it took a lot of effort to pirate a cart and the board/chips inside.

That's probably true. After all, bootleggers produced various monstrosities as early as the NES days! Here's one "classic":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJTdKwPSJUk

of course today, you have some amazing homebrews! That said, I'd like to know just how Nintendo was planning on putting something such as Dark Souls on a cartridge? hey, it's probably possible, but doesn't sound so cost effective. Then again, PS Vita and 3DS are quite impressive little cartridges!

I think what they meant by "faster" is not that the games themselves moved faster in the "Blast Processing" sense of the word (lol), but that they were faster in that they had little to no loading times, which is true.

While that was true, again that is just an excuse (see Ashley's post above). Also, while loading times were slow compared to today's games, I don't recall too many people saying they hated Symphony of the Night because of the load time. Ultimately Nintendo was just behind the times. Seems to be a recurring theme for them for whatever reasons.