Sacking of Los Gatos engineers point of no return?

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I think what Dave is pointing out is that the ideas and expertise were there to develop the Amiga chipset (and I can believe that), the senior management were not keen to spend money on any new "Big Chips", so the WC team had to make inexpensive incremental upgrades to the chipset they had rather than anything new and exciting.

Having worked in a large organisation I know full well how good ideas and exciting new directions can be killed off by poor management.

It is my assessment of the situation, that the C= engineers did the best they could with the resources they had in a company with little vision and poor leadership. The tech industry moved too quickly for the Commodore, Atari and even the Apple management of the time could understand.

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I can't argue with that, and yes the ultimate blame does lay with with Commodore management. However I can't see any evidence from products outside the C64 and A1000 chipset that anything as good would ever happen again based on products/prototypes sold.

You have no idea what projects were in development, what ideas were brought to the engineering management, what got cancelled, what got the green light only to be shelved once production costs became apparent.

Cost/performance is the issue not ultimate performance too sure.

Not sure what you are trying to say here, but Commodore strategy was low cost, high volume.

Case in point, how difficult would it have been to put two Paula chips on the A4000/3000 motherboard for 8 channel sound? Given the price of these machines it should have been done (well a new sound chip to be honest but dual Paula would have been a cheap fix).

That would be a nasty hack, which given Paula's intimate relationship with the system (interrupt controller etc) probably would have required a lot of work, just to make it work... Which would have added at least $10 BOM on to the design ($40 in retail), for some more sound channels, of which the Amiga already had more than most machines? How do you explain that to your manager?

In a company like Commodore, if something isn't broken... You don't fix it and you certainly don't make it more expensive.

Hell working C65 prototype chipset had 256/4096 colours in 320x200 and pre-dated AGA didn't it?

Never made it to production. It's a case in point, and is actually against your argument.

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What pre-1994 games would have benefited from a chunky mode?

With a decent blitter and some VRAM, all of them

By 1992, I was using the Blitter for almost everything... With sprites for some "effects"... I did often use dual playfields to increase visual complexity and reduce load on the blitter, but that was to cover the deficiency in the hardware

-Edit- Just want to add that the only real advantage of Planar Graphics over chunky is that they can more efficiently use the available memory... But once you have 2mb or more, that advantage is mute

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The original blitter would have worked more or less with chunky pixels, it would be just like having a 2 colour display. You'd have to be careful not to set a stupid shift when blitting, although that would be an interesting effect. Moving the blitter to 32bit would have made it more efficient.
 
AGA chip ram bandwidth would probably have been good enough, although it would be better if you could have enough bandwidth for dual playfield 8 bit or single playfield 16 bit without saturating the bus.
 
020ec would be good enough if a simple texture mapper was implemented in the blitter, you could use line draw hardware as the basis for the edge tracing and you just need a small texture cache and a line mapper.

I agree, the Amiga's blitter would have done just fine with a chunky mode, and it would have improved performance in certain areas, but the question was " pre '94 games improved by chunky graphics"... Without some VRAM the improvements would have been minimal...

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The least a chunky mode would have done, was give us non dithered 3D. Most amiga flat shaded 3D games were in 16 (4bp) colours to keep the frame rate up. I think even without VRAM, we could have had 32 colour 3D.

Well chunky doesn't make much sense below a byte, so it would have allowed 256 colour 3D... 32 colours needs 5bits which is difficult to work in chunky mode.

Chunky allows in a single memory write what takes O(biplanes) number of write in planar, ie a 256 colour pixel write on planar takes 8 memory writes... But only 1 on chunky. This is why I feel AGA was really a poor upgrade

@PSXPhil
"It is theoretical, but the only way that commodore could have succeeded would have been to head off the move to PC and console gaming."

The Amiga was in a dangerous place, between the PC and the consoles. It was also an ideal place- It could have replaced both, it did for me, for a long time. Over time, consoles have become more PC like (films, music,facebook, browsing etc)
And many PC's have attempted to become more console like (shuttle, XBMC etc).
In away, both have become more Amiga like.

The PC sounded like a jet engine, cost a lot, and came in this massive 1970's style case, not living room, or child bedroom friendly.

The consoles were lobotomized computers.

There was still a big gap for an amiga style computer.

Yeah, I basically agree with this.