Seems I may remember the differences between the various versions Desert Strike incorrectly. A video comparison would be nice regardless
As to 16 bit consoles platformers, it's not just that they were easier to program for. It's also (as unpopular as this might be to say on an Amiga forum) because the consoles had better hardware for this sort of thing - more playfields, more objects on screen, more colours on screen without requiring trickery, graphics hardware that generally doesn't slow down the CPU, etc.. And in the case of the SNES a larger palette as well.
This doesn't mean Amiga hardware is bad for gaming, it's just that console hardware was better optimised for games whereas Amiga hardware had all sorts of features that are better suited for general computing (f.ex. there is a reason that consoles all used tile based graphics and the Amiga instead opted for a bitplane/bitmap based system).