I agree that it was not the "custom chipsets" in the Amiga that doomed Commodore to bankruptcy. It was the continued mis-management of Commodore and the lack of vision and money put into development which was needed to keep the Amiga ahead of the competition and lack of marketing which should have educated the growing number of computer users about the advantages the Amiga had in the beginning over all other computers when the A1000 was released.
Although the AmigaOS was elegant and far ahead of all the competition in many ways for a long time, the degree of that lead over competitors was quickly diminished as the Amiga was stagnant or little improved between the release of the A1000 and the release of the A3000 and the improvements introduced with AGA and the A1200/A4000 was far too little, too late. Even the introduction of the A3000 and AmigaOS2.0 was a disappointment to most Amiga users, who saw it as too little, too late as well.
We had some looong threads about AGA recently, but I must say, I think AGA would have okay if something else was on its way to replace it fairly shortly, if amiga's had been a bit beefier. If the 1200 had shipped with an 030 and even 2 megs of fast RAM, it'd have been a pretty respectable machine in 92, when the competition was still windows 3.1 and trying to do two things at once.
People talk about Doom a lot as the evidence AGA wasn't good enough, but I've had people independently of each other say my 030 runs it faster than their PC's did back in the day.
If only a partial upgrade was coming, I'd feel stronger about a new sound chip, than about the graphics part, to be honest.
Again, this is assuming Commodore actually had money and something else was coming fairly shortly to replace it and provide a bigger step up.
Maybe its time for another "how to make Commodore survive" speculation thread?
