It took far too long to come up with effective solutions for this, and the ones that did exist, like the A2024 grayscale square-ish megapixel pixel display, noninterlaced, were too late and had too many compromises.
The Amiga had an uphill battle against the head start mac enjoyed ( and seemed, to the casual observer, rather naturally suited to with its crisp black and white display) in DTP to begin with, and without a native laser printing, a good scanning solution, enforcdd UI consistency through quickdraw and most of all adobe, there was never a reasonable chance that it would seriously challenge Apple in that market.
The unsuitability of a very visibly interlaced display to fine detail black and white layout work insured it would never be tolerated by people who had to work with such tools 8 hours a day.
Totally agree about the absence of a pennies per unit midi port as being a damnable error on Commodore's part; likely one of the main reasons the non-pc market was fatally fragmented three ways instead of a possibly manageable two, and gifting the ST (which was in all other respects an admirable me-too effort at best), a lifeline by which wedge itself into the nascent multimedia production market, which really would have been better off entirely associated with one or two platforms rather than two/three.
Atari Corp only existed (and produced a 68k) because of his departure. Along with some key engineers. The Atari ST is in large part Shiraz Shivji's design, after coming over from Commodore where he worked on various things including the C64 and one of the ill-fated "business" computers that CBM was making.
I'm not sure what Commodore would look like if the Tramiels had stayed, though. It may have imploded in other ways. And Commodore under him really didn't seem to get software/platforms/compatibility.
Also the ST didn't get placement inside studios just because of the MIDI ports. It was also because it was a) $cheap$ b) completely reliable solid timing [no multitasking helps there] c) had a fairly Mac-like GUI d) the top-notch paper white 640x400 (pretty good resolution for the time) monochrome monitor & mode.
It also wouldn't have done well in studios if it weren't for the German software scene and the development of Steinberg's Cubase and e-Magic's Notator. The ST was popular in Germany. Most of the really good software came out of there (see also Calamus DTP)
Gluing a MIDI port into the Amiga wouldn't necessarily had brought that set of happenstances to the Amiga.
It was pretty feature complete, so much so that it could probably be used today as-is.
People who used it likely felt a drop off, even to something like Pagemaker, etc.
GDOS (part of GEM with proportional fonts etc) not shipping with the original machine was a huge mistake for one.
Still Calamus + the cheap Atari laser printer was a pretty amazing piece of DTP kid for the people who got it.
That and it was simple to just turn your ST into a Macintosh. But with higher resolution and slightly higher clock speed.
The desktop publishing revolution came when average Joe Schmoe could whip off a (almost) professional-looking typeset zine on his home desktop computer. That was An Atari ST, and Atari SLM, and Calamus.
> The ST was responsible for the desktop publishing revolution with a very affordable laser printer peripheral (although I couldn't afford one, it cost almost as much as a basic Macintosh).
I actually worked in the DTP industry. I did both write and typeset books.
Everything professional and semi-professional was made on Macintosh. You'd enter a bookstore and easily 99%+ of the books and magazines were typeset on Mac.
I don't remember the Atari ST as having a particularly good of influential font story neither.
I mean: yup, I was typeseting my Dungeons & Dragons character sheets on my Amiga. Doesn't mean it was a revolution.
The DTP revolution was the Macintosh.