They ended up solving this problem eventually with ColdFire. They dropped a few instructions and addressing modes and were able to produce something pretty performant. But just 15 years too late :-)

And now that's dead too. And yeah I think the engineers at Motorola in the 90s basically just saw the RISC writing on the wall and threw up their hands and said that was the way to go, customers be damned, meanwhile Intel just had too much invested in x86 CISC and couldn't do that and so was forced to make it work.