I get what he means, when you start buying £1000 PPC cards for £400 A4000/030s etc etc you still will be limited with something as simple as browsing certain modern websites with problems. So more is less as he kind of says.
I get what he says too...KISS principle. Keep it simple. Sometimes people can miss the elegance of a basic Amiga setup. You define your parameters more simply and take huge advantage of what can be done in those parameters.
Like look at the C64 scene...they have (mostly) a single, unchanged hardware setup that has remained the same across decades and millions of computers, and they've stretched it to the limit to do amazing things.
The more bits and bobs you add to your Amiga, the less compatible you make it with other Amigas and the more likely the house of cards is to fail.
I'm not against an expanded Amiga....I had an A2000 that was expanded almost to the maximum....but it became a real headache to keep running after a while, and I knew that when some of the rarer bits of hardware failed, I would have no way of replacing them. Whereas with a stock Amiga (maybe with a common 1/2MB RAM expansion and a simple hard drive) it's easy to find replacement parts.
A stock Amiga can really do a LOT of stuff if you stop trying to think about it as having to do everything a modern PC or MAC does and instead think of it as a creative tool for specific, unique uses....like a game programming platform (AMOS), or a pixel-art studio (DPAINT), or a music composition machine (Trackers).
Sometimes more is less. For instance....I record music. Back in the 1980s/90s I had only a simple setup that could do MIDI and I had to bounce tracks between two cassette tape decks to do overdubs of real instruments. Sometimes I rented a cassette four-track but that was IT. Still, I recorded tons of stuff and used that technology to its maximum.
Now I have a computer on my desktop that can record 128 tracks of audio, has about 100 effects to choose from, and can do more than most professional recording studios could do in the 1980 or early 1990s. But does that immense choice help me be more productive? Unfortunately no. Sometimes I find myself just overwhelmed with the amount of choice. I am constantly tweaking effects, timing, EQ, latency settings, etc. instead of doing actual music composition. I think a lot of musicians have experienced this.
Like I said in another thread, sometimes I feel like setting up a plain Amiga 500 again with a simple MIDI sequencer and a couple synths and drum machine and just go at it, writing music rather than tweaking.
I still love DAWs and expanded Amigas....I just am finding simple systems more and more beautiful now rather than disdaining them like I used to.
