I think that's a fascinating subject. At its time, as far as I can remember Amiga computers were perceived almost as a game console with a keyboard. Of course, they were able to run business software and they were used as graphic stations, but that's the general perception I felt at the time... Even as a game console it was soon surpased by Sega Genesis and SNES.
Curiously, sometimes happened the opposite you are telling: for example, Deluxe Paint was written in C originally for the Amiga (link to source code). It was ported to IBM and it turned to be even more successful on this platform!
And I had another thought. If ANSI.SYS was too inefficient, and also application developers didn't want to add a complication to their product that a specific fast ANSI.SYS be installed, that fast ANSI.SYS could have been hidden in the C library and statically linked so that no-one would even know. No worse than doing direct writes to the screen buffer, which is what they did anyway.
And it just occurred to me that that's how I may be able to solve an existing problem I have - not being able to run my ANSI version of microemacs 3.6 under HX - I should be able to solve that with a custom msvcrt.dll (as opposed to the msvcrt.dll that I produced for pdos/386).
Which would come very close to making Freedos+HX my development platform. In fact, maybe the entire way - because the problem I currently have with HX - one program spawning another - may have gone away with the new linker (pdld). And even then - if I revisit the spawn issue, I might be able to work around the same thing with another change to the custom msvcrt.dll.
Stay tuned?