There is a really well-written post from 2015 about the dealer network situation back then, and how C= departed it for the 64. When the Amiga was ready for market they were at a huge disadvantage.
There were two entirely separate distribution channels for computers in the mid-1980s: the network of specialized dealers, who offered service, advice, and support along with computers to their customers; and the mass merchants, big-box stores like Sears and Toys ‘R’ Us and the big consumer-electronics chains, who sold computers alongside televisions and washing machines and offered little to nothing in the way of support, competing instead almost entirely on the basis of price. Commodore under Jack Tramiel had pioneered the latter form of distribution with the VIC-20, the first truly mass-market home computer. Most people were happy to buy a relatively cheap machine, especially one meant for casual home use, through a big-box store. Those spending more money, and especially those buying a machine for use in business, preferred to safeguard their investment by going through a dealer. Thus Apple, IBM, and the many makers of IBM clones like Compaq continued to sell their more expensive machines through dealers. Commodore and Atari, makers of cheaper, home-oriented machines, sold theirs through the mass market.
Now, however, Commodore found themselves with a more expensive machine and no dealer network through which to sell it, a last little poison pill left to them by Jack Tramiel. One might say that Commodore was forced to start again from scratch — except that it was actually worse than that. In late 1982 Tramiel had destroyed what was left of Commodore’s dealer network when he dumped the successor to the VIC-20, the Commodore 64, into the mass-market channel as well, just weeks after promising his long-suffering dealers that he would do no such thing. That betrayal had put many of his dealers out of business, leaving the rest to sign on with other brands whilst saying, “Never again.” New Commodore CEO Marshall Smith was honestly trying in his stolid, conservative, steel-industry way to remove the whiff of disreputability that had always clung to the company under Tramiel. But the memories of most potential dealers were still too long, no matter how impressive the machine Commodore now had to offer them. The result was that many major American cities now sported, at best, just one or two places where you could walk in and buy an Amiga. It was a crippling disadvantage.
It's hard for me to read this stuff about a company I hold so dearly. The Ranger project was probably knocked down as it would have likely caused backwards compatibility issues, but I can't help but wonder what could have been. Miner already proved that his ideas were better than most. The fact that his name isn't remembered like Woz is a shame.
But in the early 90s the tightly closed architecture of the Amiga line and how the OS spoke to the chips didn't easily allow for popping video cards in and out like the PC clones could. Back then if you had money the answer for performance wasn't elegance, it was swapping out your CPU and simply let it make up for the losses in design. It was a brute force solution, but allowed PC owners to limp along to the next card or chip rather than replace a whole system. If they had put a CD into the 1200, 3000 or 4000 instead of the CD32 it would have possibly helped perceptions. But they ultimately would have had to decouple from the Motorola chips, which I believe Ranger would have done, and created a platform for the future. Which I guess is where OS 4 eventually went (and MorphOS and Aros) but too little too late. If you're going to that route you might as well try Linux IMO. I'll stick with the classic OSes...