Oh my, no wonder you have such a poor impression of the OS. In 1993 Acorn released the FPA10 Floating Point Accelerator for the A540, A5000 and R260 which boosted floating point performance by a factor of 50; the A5000 was also ARM3 but clocked at 33MHz. From a similar era as your A3000, the A5000 was the absolute best overall Arch, in my opinion, although I'm also terribly fond of the later RiscPC (ARM7, then StrongARM at 202MHz, then 233MHz, and ultimately 270ish MHz). I've since sold one of my RPCs but can't bear to part with the other. But seriously, if you ditched RISC OS around the time of the A3000, it's no wonder if you thought either/both hardware and software were lacking - you seem to have parted ways with RISC OS just at its most exciting time. I was at Wakefield when the
RiscPC Rocketship (pizza oven, kitchen sink) was unveiled for the first time. Now those were exciting days.