Without CU and AF the Amiga would have all but disappeared years before it did.
In fact I bought my first amiga, an A500 as a cheap way to play games, just after Commodore went bankrupt, which meant 100's of Amiga's for sale, real cheap.
The first Amiga mag I bought was the AF with Real 3D V1.4 as a cover cd. The article on 3D rendering fascinated me. It ran on that A500, and I let render the demo candlescene over night.
I was hooked, the games fell by the wayside. I started buying CU with Image FX, Imagine Wordworth. I also bought Australian and Commodore Review magazine (which BTW are available for free download somewhere). The tutes in these magazines inspired me to use my cover apps. Then came a GVP hard drive with 3 meg ram. Then an A1200,with a Cobra 40 mhz '030, then an Apollo '040 @ 33 mhz overclocked to 40 mhz. Then I got Photogenics, ImageFx2 off cover discs, ended up buying Photogenics 2, Image Fx 3, Turboprint, Umax Scanner, NEC 3D multisync. The cover cd's meant I ended up with a PC CD and hard drive minitower with an IDE lead snaking from the side of the A1200. The Cinema 4D came out on a cover cd, I ended up buying Cinema 4d V4. But all of these apps really needed a graphics card, so I eventually stumped up for an A4000, Cyberstorm 68060, with CV 64 and 17" Sony trinitron. None of this woulda happened if i didn't buy that first AF with Real 3D 1.4 on the cover, i'm sure I'm not the only one similarly affected!