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I think the single biggest missed opportunity -- a feature I got Gunnar to add to his sprites and stolen from the Commodore 64 -- is Multi-Color Mode. MCM on the Amiga, whether enabled for a sprite or bit plane, could group two pixels together to provide double the color depth at the expense of doubling the horizontal width of the apparent pixel (at least at that bit plane).
You could have one 16 color sprite without attaching, a 64 color sprite by attaching an MCM sprite and non-MCM sprite or a 256 color sprite by having both be in MCM mode. This could be mixed with non-MCM planes to make virtually any bit depth all the way up to 12 bpp (6 bpp in MCM mode). A single play field in DPF mode could be up to 64 colors or any point in between to get both good resolution and good color depth.
The lookup table could still have been 32 colors with EHB at 64, then have direct modes at 7-bpp up to 12-bpp using 232, 233, 333, 343, 344 and then 444 RGB. I love HAM and all, but 12-bpp "super low-res" would have been MUCH, MUCH better.
In many ways, this would have exceeded what even AGA could do all without asking for one more bit of data from the chip RAM.
Combine that with the sprite tiling for extra layers and we might have ended up with something that could go toe-to-toe with the SNES or, dare I say, the NEO GEO? Because nothing is stopping the COPPER from reusing those sprites over, and over, and over again.
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