Some good points all round here I think.
My belief in what drove the original Amiga market are based on several things. I got my A500 for games, some of the best games, anywhere at the time. Once I owned it, I realised both the hardware and OS were cutting edge, and I branched out into graphic design, and 3d modelling.The Amiga got me my job in the games industry, nothing else I could of afforded would have allowed that.
I see nothing cutting edge in any of the new succesors to AmigaOS. People flocked to the Amiga because they wanted to work on something brilliant, at a very competative price (compared to the mac/wintels).The new machines cannot compete with the price of wintel boxes.
So what have we got- Users? fewer every year, now spread over two platforms. {bleep}iness between the two which would never have happened in the old, unified Amiga community.
Software? Most of the games developers/ software developers have moved on. One thing about the Ami was the fact that she had some of the best software anywhere, but our competitors did not realsie it until it was ported to their machine (which most of it now has been). The exclusive smugness I got from being able to use imagine,lightwave,Cinema4D,Pagestream has gone now-they are either available on other platforms or gone completly from our own.
Without state of the art OS/hardware, lots of software,lots of users, decent price- where is there for the Amiga to go? I don't see anywhere other than a small old school community of fans.
