>>923592
>it had SIGNIFICANTLY more programs than the Amiga
That's a really sketchy statement when "program" for the C64 often meant as little as "some thing I retyped from a magazine today". In terms of volume of code the C64 wouldn't even come close. Amiga software was about as complex as early PC software, had real toolchains that ran on the actual hardware, and its software was influential beyond the Amiga, for better or worse. I had skipped from C64 to PC and was quite jealous of how easy a time the Amiga guys had of audio/video.
>>923592
>PEEK and POKE that basically acted as machine code programming
PEEK and POKE were incredibly slow and even moving around sprites with them at a decent speed was difficult. It's been 30+ years but I still remember how awful the hot air balloon tutorial was compared to what could be done with assembly despite it doing almost nothing. Most software written in BASIC was hobbyist tier or the kind of thing we'd consider webshit's domain today like software for form entry. The only game in BASIC I can remember playing was Telengard and that was mainly due to its lineage and age.
>>923599
>Truth is, most users who even tried to program (a small minority) didn't make it past BASIC on the Amiga
Then those that did sure were productive. The C64 had essentially zero impact on the early PC but Amiga cursed us with having to deal with all sorts of wacky formats, coding schemes, extensions in front of filenames, mysterious variants of LHA that kept breaking, media tooling, etc.. There was a lot of crossover and information sharing in the BBS scene back then between PC and Amiga coders.