I saw an Amiga once in person around 86 and spent that next decade disappointed, but advocating that the future of computing was going to be great. Emotionally I still feel like we haven't caught up to the Amiga but I imagine that isn't really true, heh.

Similar story with me. I got an Amiga 1000 and did a fair bit of assembly coding on it, then ended up writing some 16-bit x86 assembly for school later on. Being used to having sixteen 32-bit registers, then all the sudden having to use AX, BX, CX, and DX (and don't forget they all have slightly different purposes!) was like being brutally shoved back into the 80's.

Well, history has shown neither RISC nor CISC as actually a better choice, since both models more or less converged to a sort of hybrid design years ago.

And what this has to do with Amiga?

At a simplistic level, the difference between RISC and CISC processor design boils down to having many registers and reduced instructions, or few registers and extra specialized instructions.

What was being described is going to programming from a RISC-like design processor to a CISC-like design processor, and how they felt constrained after doing so. It likely does feel more constraining (I don't really remember how I felt about it back when I did it, but I also went the other direction, and only in the context of classwork), but in the end, most people are programming a level removed from that anyways.

There used to be quite a lot of arguments about what design was better (IMO mostly fueled by Macs running a RISC processor and Windows running a CISC processor, at least until Apple switched to x86). I find it slightly comical that both designs ended up in a fairly similar place though (with RISC processors adding extra instructions, and CISC processors adding more registers, even if mostly just logical registers).

All of them: IBM PC, Amiga and classic Mac were using CISC CPUs...

You're right that the Amiga was CISC, I was mistaken there.

The Classic Mac was as well, but PowerPC based macs were RISC, which is what I was recalling in my followup.

And seriously, who thought that "MOV A B" actually means "A = B" was a good idea?

68000 has it right!

I must have been 12 or 13 years old when I first met an IBM PC. I was used to 8 bit micros having BASIC right away (and colour). But you couldn't do anything with a PC before using two floppies. First DOS then whatever. It just seemed awful. Why would anyone want one of those?

I was used to all the 8 bit machines and their graphics and sound too, but I was enthralled by 80 column BASIC and DOS with its hierarchal file system as well. I saw it as a separate branch of computing entirely.

And once EGA came out, it quickly started to surpass the 8 bits as a gaming platform too.

That's not correct. If you don't have a floppy disk, the PC boots into ROM BASIC just like the 8-bit home computers of the time.