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Your needs seemed very application driven, like most of the people using Toasters in their Amigas. Once the Amiga was no longer meeting their needs, and better tools became available, they moved on.
So, if 3D/CAD was the main application for you, why stick with the Amiga once it no longer met your needs? Why today?
Ummm - what do you want to tell me with that? Do you want me also to move on?
Clearly there are better tools for the job. Do you just prefer the OS?
Of course there are better tools for the job today. And although I like the AmigaOS this is not the reason.
Back in the early ninetees I was fascinated that I could do true 3d CAD on my Amiga 500. I also had an Amiga tool to convert the 3d data of DynaCadd into an executable CNC code that could run on the CAM system at the CAD school I was visiting at the time. It was slow, but it worked.
And all this at a fraction of the costs that I would have had to pay for a comparable x86 based system. Back then e.g. DynaCadd did cost 1,500 DM, while I would have had to pay 15,000 DM for AutoCAD.
Same for the hardware:
I bought my A500 with CBM 1082 monitor and CBM MPS 1500C color matrix printer for 1,200 DM, while a brandnew, naked 386 system (just Hercules monochrome graphics card, no sound) was around 6,000 DM at that time.
Later my decision to stay with the Amiga was simply bexause I had meanwhile collected so much software that it would have costed a fortune to replace all this Amiga productivity software with x86 software.
Furthermore I did not want buy a new PC each time a new Win version came up. Do you remember? Each new Win version required new hardware...
Over the years I had no other choice than getting PCs for the serious work, but always kept my Amigas - hoping, the Amiga situation would improve again one day.
So the Amiga still is my hobby.
Back in the mid ninetees/early 2000s I engaged with a society for the preservation of the historic Wiehltalbahn (
Wiehl valley railway).
When we had revived the line, I got the task to plan the IT infrastructure and would have loved to use Amigas for the task, but unfortunately back then no Amiga hardware with sufficient power was available.
Had the A1X1k already existed I would have tried to use. The XENA thing seemed to be very promising for this task, but so we ended up with PCs...
I had many friends that liked the games on the Amiga. Once games got better on the PC than the Amiga, they moved on. When a better tool is available for the job, why stick with an old one?
Why not?
I paid so much money for all my Amiga stuff - why should I just give/throw it away? It can still serve me as my hobby...
For me, and I think many others, the Amiga itself was the application. I liked "playing" with the system, tuning my workbench, etc.
Here we seem to differ. For me it was an unexpensive tool and had to work the way I wanted. A stunning device back then (and in some aspects even today), but nevertheless just a tool. Nothing to found a "religion" on.
I liked the hardware and the OS. I have a 4000T today with a RTG graphics card,
And despite that you nevertheless prefer the OCS over RTG? Seriously?
and while Workbench seems nice it just seems less "Amiga" to me.
Well, to me it rather seems that the Amiga can only unleash its full potential with all the expansion stuff like RTG, PCI, USB and a decent accelerator...
An Amiga 4000 as it was delivered by C= (just with AGA) was simply not really usable for daily serious work.
I too had big box Amigas long ago. I did not expand much, but I pre-ordered both the 3000 and 4000 when they were announced. I was also at World of Amiga both years they were released.
As you "did not expand much" I guess you were happy with what these machines offered in their original state, namely their graphics?
For me the custom hardware was the heart of the Amiga, along with the OS.
What do you mean with "custom"?
"Custom hardware" for me were e.g. my sound digitiser and my prommer. I built both myself - there just were the schematics, the board layouts and and the part lists from an Amiga magazine. All self-made - optical transfer of the board layout to a blank PCB, etching, drilling, populating and soldering the boards. That's "custom made" from my POV.
While I obviously wished the chipset would get upgraded and move forward to one up the competition, putting PC components in an Amiga wasn't attractive to me.
Well, for me it actually was attractive. Both - performance- and price-wise.
Comparable Amiga parts (e.g. Zorro graphics boards) were much too expensive for what they had to offer. I always wanted to get the max out of my machines - and I only could achieve this by heavily expanding the machines. And obviously I didn't want to spend a fortune for components with Amiga label, while better and cheaper solutions from the PC world were available and could be used in an Amiga with an PCI busboard.
I wanted C= to produce a new and better chipset so I could shove it in the faces of my PC-loving friends!
And - did they do so?
No.
Instead they preferred to go belly up by pumping all their money into their overpriced and underpowered x86 line of computers instead of improving the Amiga properly.
B.T.W. - what did you use to "shove it in the faces of your PC-loving friends", once you realised C= didn't develop the things you wanted, but went bust instead?
I moved on when the product stopped moving forward, when I needed a PC and could not afford both. But I always missed my Amiga, not for any particular application - I just missed using it.
I also sort of "moved on". But I instead of seling my Amiga stuff I bought my PCs second hand and so could have both. My A4kPPC is still networked with my XP-PC via RDesktop.
Nice setup - you can easily switch between AmigaOS and Windows. If the old IBrowse doesn't display correctly - just switch over to Win and browse the web with IE, Mozilla or Chrome or the like.
But it has no heart!! 
Pardon?
Hardware does not have to have an heart, it just has to do for me what I want and how I want it. No heart required so far...
Today, with NG AmigaOS 4.x systems I agree and see no point in using custom PowerPC boards. If all you care about is the OS then port it to mainstream hardware.
All I care about is that the hardware does for me what I want and how I want it.
With all the money being spent on developing custom and inferior PowerPC motherboards surely porting to x86 makes more financial sense. I don't see the logic in continuing down the path AmigaOS 4.x is currently on.
You might be right with "inferior PowerPC motherboards" as long as you compare them with x86 PC motherboards.
But once you compare it with classic Amiga hardware, your "inferior PowerPC motherboards" are more a "giant leap" forward, me thinks...
Even if you ported AmigaOS to x86, you still would have to make it 64 Bit and SMP, as the harware trend in x86 world goes this way.
So - if you want to make full use of modern x86 hardware with an hypothetical x86-AmigaOS, you would also have to enhance this OS with 64 Bit and SMP.
If PowerPC architecture really will end one day, we can still make the move to x86. But why not advancing the OS on the PPC platform in the meantime?
I mean - the decision for PPC has been made long ago and neither you, nort me, will ever change that. We should be lucky that Trevor invested money in new Amiga capable hardware and tries his best also to support software development!
