> Amiga/Commodore had the best engineers Atari had the best business folks.
This. The business folks at Atari weren't shortsighted like the ones at Commodore; adding a MIDI port alone to the ST contributed to place that machine into its own music production niche ("I want a Mac but can't afford it") which prolonged their life for years after Atari ceased production.
Adding a MIDI port to the Amiga would have been trivial, I built and sold several at that time on local BBSes, and the cost was like a few bucks: one 74ls04, one photocoupler, one voltage regulator and a few analog parts; making it internal would have been even cheaper due to not having to add a serial D25 connector and an enclosure, not to mention the parts purchase in the ten of thousands. Unfortunately the business folks at Commodore constantly cut corners by removing what they thought not important for what they still thought of a game console, so one would buy a desktop computer only to find it had no hard disk and real time clock: boot from floppy and set the date/time at each boot? Come on! One would wonder how it could not fail.
> Adding a MIDI port to the Amiga would have been trivial
The Amiga is unsuitable for serious MIDI work because of a hardware design flaw. There are like 4 timers and the timer interrupts were at a higher priority than the serial port interrupt. There was only a 1-byte buffer for the serial port, so it was possible to lose data if one of the higher priority timers fired at the wrong time.[1]
I can't verify that since I sold everything ages ago, but before buying the A4000, first with my A500 and then the A2000 (w/ no acceleration) I could easily sample a complex flam+roll figure I did on my old Roland R8 pads at crazy granularity (software and hardware were capable of recording and playing 1/384 notes), and it didn't miss a single note.
That figure was obtainable by pressing both flam and roll buttons while modulating the dynamics on the instrument pad; very handy to simulate natural cymbal rolls during song pauses, endings etc. I used it during a song start with the snare, and the only editing necessary was performed afterwards to cut the inevitable leftover notes because I was playing with my fingers.
Software used was Dr T's KCS, which was a lot more optimized and snappy than MusicX, which I remember to be quite buggy too.
This. The business folks at Atari weren't shortsighted like the ones at Commodore; adding a MIDI port alone to the ST contributed to place that machine into its own music production niche ("I want a Mac but can't afford it") which prolonged their life for years after Atari ceased production. Adding a MIDI port to the Amiga would have been trivial, I built and sold several at that time on local BBSes, and the cost was like a few bucks: one 74ls04, one photocoupler, one voltage regulator and a few analog parts; making it internal would have been even cheaper due to not having to add a serial D25 connector and an enclosure, not to mention the parts purchase in the ten of thousands. Unfortunately the business folks at Commodore constantly cut corners by removing what they thought not important for what they still thought of a game console, so one would buy a desktop computer only to find it had no hard disk and real time clock: boot from floppy and set the date/time at each boot? Come on! One would wonder how it could not fail.