Please stop making your own history. HAM8 modes are/were quite slow, and it was far from (quite) common to use them for anything else than showing images.
The thing that sold me on the amiga was Newtek Demo (running on a A2000 in MicroCenter) which if I'm not mistaken ran entirely in HAM mode while doing animations. When I found out the A500 had the same capabilities, I started saving my money.
From Newtek there was also Digipaint with not only used HAM mode but in my opinion was certainly one of the crispest UI of any of the paint programs(Faster than DPAINT). Photon Paint also used HAM as did Brilliance. The UI of those were not as crispy as Digipaint, but certainly not "slow" and certainly not uncommon.
HAM inadvertantly became one of the selling points of the amiga thus a huge part of the history.
Wen you were arguing with an Atari user over which machine was superior, they never had an answer for "What about HAM mode..."
