I feel like I'm taking crazy pills because the Amiga was an architectural nightmare but everyone pretends to love it.
There were multiple types of RAM, and not like the PC's conventional/extended/enhanced or whatever there were multiple PHYSICAL types of RAM and upgrading one over the other might make it so upgrade cards don't work, or are slower, or have incompatibility issues.
When I upgraded the video card in my A2000 to a picasso-something I had to have three different drivers and switch between them because AmigaOS didn't have the concept of "a driver" like Mac and PC. One operating mode for old amiga programs hard-coded to OCS, one mode for compatibility with later amiga standards, and one mode for card-specific high-res/high-color modes for pro apps.
How can you tell which mode you have to use? Just do things until it crashes and then guess that the video mode was the culprit and switch modes until one works, of course!
I installed too much of one kind of ram so the address space of the ram expansion board overran into the space for other zorro-ii slots which switched my graphics card into a slower mode unless I disabled some ram. Was this documented, either by the board manufacturer or Commodore? No. Did I find out on a random BBS while complaining about how my fancy new graphics card was so slow? Yes.
The 68000 in my A2000 was slow the day it was introduced so a couple of months later I forked out for an accelerator card and because everything was so tightly integrated with the original CPU and the amiga solution to everything seemed to be "just hang it off the CPU bus and hard code it to the timing of the original CPU" things would be blazing fast until they hit some kind of rarely-used Paula/Denise/Agnus function that HAD to occur at 7 MHz and crashed at which time I had to turn the A2000 off, flip a toggle switch I drilled into the back of the case, reboot and re-do what I was doing at the original speed.
But yeah, the last time I turned on my A2000, which I still have, (except to play Lemmings or pull some files off its hard drive) was around the time that Wolfenstein 3D came out.
edit: also, until its dying day Commodore refused to even acknowledge that computer networking existed. It was easier to share files and resources between an Apple II and a PC over a network than it was to share files and resources between two Amigas.
You are not taking crazy pills. You just had a bad experience because you bought a low quality accelerator and video card for your Amiga.
The different types of RAM were part of the reason the Amiga was so powerful and was a feature, not a flaw. The fast RAM was only used by the CPU so it could run faster without the custom chips slowing the CPU. Because the CPU mostly used the fast RAM, the custom chips weren't slowed down by the CPU. This effectively made the data bus nearly twice as fast.
By the time custom graphic cards were coming for the Amiga, people were just trying to keep up with the IBM PC. Those video cards weren't designed to match the architecture of the system. That's not the Amiga's fault, but a fault of those aftermarket video cards. That is also why you had problems with RAM overlapping. I never used those cards and had no problems.
If you bought an IBM PC at 4.77 MHz and put a 286 accelerator in it, it would be hobbled too. If you wanted more speed, you should have gotten the Amiga 3000 in 1990 with a fully 32-bit 68030 @ 25 MHz with 32-bit RAM, like I did, and I never had to deal with crashes and it was faster than your accelerator.
I don't know how you can say Commodore refused to acknowledge that computer networking existed when they had released the A2065 Ethernet card for the A2000. Few people had LANs at home back then so it was mostly used in businesses.
It sounds to me like you made a number of bad purchase decisions and ended up with a mess of your own making. Sure there were good quality accelerators and video cards but apparently you didn't buy those ones or didn't want to wait for the Amiga 3000.
There were multiple types of RAM, and not like the PC's conventional/extended/enhanced or whatever there were multiple PHYSICAL types of RAM and upgrading one over the other might make it so upgrade cards don't work, or are slower, or have incompatibility issues.
When I upgraded the video card in my A2000 to a picasso-something I had to have three different drivers and switch between them because AmigaOS didn't have the concept of "a driver" like Mac and PC. One operating mode for old amiga programs hard-coded to OCS, one mode for compatibility with later amiga standards, and one mode for card-specific high-res/high-color modes for pro apps.
How can you tell which mode you have to use? Just do things until it crashes and then guess that the video mode was the culprit and switch modes until one works, of course!
I installed too much of one kind of ram so the address space of the ram expansion board overran into the space for other zorro-ii slots which switched my graphics card into a slower mode unless I disabled some ram. Was this documented, either by the board manufacturer or Commodore? No. Did I find out on a random BBS while complaining about how my fancy new graphics card was so slow? Yes.
The 68000 in my A2000 was slow the day it was introduced so a couple of months later I forked out for an accelerator card and because everything was so tightly integrated with the original CPU and the amiga solution to everything seemed to be "just hang it off the CPU bus and hard code it to the timing of the original CPU" things would be blazing fast until they hit some kind of rarely-used Paula/Denise/Agnus function that HAD to occur at 7 MHz and crashed at which time I had to turn the A2000 off, flip a toggle switch I drilled into the back of the case, reboot and re-do what I was doing at the original speed.
But yeah, the last time I turned on my A2000, which I still have, (except to play Lemmings or pull some files off its hard drive) was around the time that Wolfenstein 3D came out.
edit: also, until its dying day Commodore refused to even acknowledge that computer networking existed. It was easier to share files and resources between an Apple II and a PC over a network than it was to share files and resources between two Amigas.