Mostly it's nostalgia. It was such massive leaps ahead at the time.
But there's a lot of quirks that still stand out.
Some of my favorites include datatypes - closed source Amiga programs released 30+ years ago can load things like webp images if they support datatypes, as long as you drop a datatype into your system.
And AREXX. The language is pretty awful, but the pervasiveness of AREXX ports in Amiga applications and how normal users took advantage of it is something I haven't seen since.
The openness (despite the os being closed source) of the platform is another one. Hardware schematics. A composable, modular well documented OS where everything could be patched and replaced. Where people kept experimenting with new file systems because you could just drop a file in and it'd be accessible. Or new device drivers, including virtual ones. Or plugged in new system wide file requesters, because they could.
A lot of it has more to do with the community around it than the machines themselves.
It's definitely nostalgia for me. I still remember the day I got Shadow of the Beast for my Amiga 500, back in 1989. I was blown away by the graphics, especially parallax scrolling, and sound. I taught myself C on that machine (Lattice 5.x?) Some of the things I learned still are with me to this day. Before that I had only used BASIC.
I later upgraded to an Amiga 3000. That was my favorite machine of the early 90's era. Eventually, Linux started taking off and around 1994 I moved on from the Amiga.
I play around with the Amiga occasionally on various emulators. I also got a MIST box some years ago (which is an FPGA-based emulator.) IMO the FPGA stuff isn't worth it given the speed of emulation you can obtain even on a Raspberry Pi.
But there's a lot of quirks that still stand out.
Some of my favorites include datatypes - closed source Amiga programs released 30+ years ago can load things like webp images if they support datatypes, as long as you drop a datatype into your system.
And AREXX. The language is pretty awful, but the pervasiveness of AREXX ports in Amiga applications and how normal users took advantage of it is something I haven't seen since.
The openness (despite the os being closed source) of the platform is another one. Hardware schematics. A composable, modular well documented OS where everything could be patched and replaced. Where people kept experimenting with new file systems because you could just drop a file in and it'd be accessible. Or new device drivers, including virtual ones. Or plugged in new system wide file requesters, because they could.
A lot of it has more to do with the community around it than the machines themselves.