I never said Dungeon keeper was a much better strategic game, and i think that it also never lived up to its own full potential. trust me when i say this, me finding Dungeons rather boring after a really short while has nothing to do with Dungeon Keeper 2.
If you wanna talk about atmosphere, and because the overall mechanics are different, which pretty much leave the atmospheric value of the game to be the shared factor of the two with both dealling with building undergound dungeons, then both games kinda tries to answer why dungeons in DnD and fantasy games look the way they look, or what happens in them when the heroes arent around.
DK2 took the whole "eco system" or "life sim" approach, which is a more naturalistic way of looking at the dungeons and basically saying, dungeons really are just homes for monsters, while "Dungeons" approached it directly as an answer to why dungeons looks the way they do in the mechanical way of things: why monsters are so weak early on, why is there a gradual advancement in the dungeon and so on, "Dungeons" pretty much answers directly to why dungeons built the way they are in video games.
so for me, atmospheric wise, disregarding all the visual goodies you can easily produce 12 years later (which, in my opinion, arent that great either), the mechanical way of looking at things in "Dungeons" prevent it from conveying real atmosphere, something which dungeon keeper 2 succeeded doing.