I have mixed feelings about the CD32, it wasn't quite powerful enough, but had the expansion potential that no other console had/has. After C= disarster with the CDTV (far to ahead of its time) the management didn't believe the world was truely ready for CD ROM.
If they had produced a A1200 type system with an internal CD ROM early enough and got the devlopers behind them they could have killed domestic piricy (probably the real Amiga killer) for a good few years (remember CD writers are a long way off!)
But the A4000 was a great idea crap implimentation, cost cutting everywhere meant that a developers board got turned into the real deal crammed into a cheap PC desktop case. The real A4000 (A3000+) was meant to be SCSI based have a internal Scan Doubler for Hires SVGA monitors, and a FAST RAM system that wasn't limited to about 15Mb/s transfer rate!
IDE is fine today and is a useful (cheap) solution but back then before real UDMA, SCSI only used a few percent of processing power.
In hindsight more RTG should have been introduced aswell. The Amiga Chipset which made the Amiga what it was in the Early 90's was beginning to become more 'cludged' together (I think I just made up a new word :-D ) with more DMA bugs and sprite fetching was doing some weird things. I heard somewhere that C= lost the original Chipset designs and had to reverse engineer them for the ECS/AGA (Don't know if thats true).
Instead of the A4000, a desktop A1200 in a nice slimline case + CD ROM should have been built, with a couple of zorro III slots if possible!)
Meanwhile the A4000 (A3000+) with SCSI and probably PCI (just starting to become mainstream enough to be cheap) with an '060. That would have meant better RTG support would be required.
I think i'll leave it there for now...
