workbench with 4 colors... why? Commodore never realised that a 32 color version would be VERY different?
Rember that Windows 3.0 was 16 colors in 1993, why not have a 32 color workbench in 1987?
OCS and ECS chipset don't do 32 colours in hires mode. Maximum is 16, but IIRC that sucks most (if not all?) system resources while the screen is visible (the only moment other stuff gets to run freely is during vertical and horizontal screen blanking).
Making the desktop reeeally slow and suck all system resources wouldn't have been very smart move.
