Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was it necessarily a dead end? Considering the ways Intel and later AMD managed to upgrade/re-invent x86 that until x64 still retained so much of the x86 instruction encoding/heritage (heck, even x64 retains some of the instruction encoding characteristics). Had the Amiga retained relevance for longer and without a push for PowerPC I don't see a reason why 68k wouldn't have been extended. Heck the FPGA Apollo 68080 w…
The argument is that 68k is "CISCier" than x86, the addressing modes in particular, so making a performant modern out-of-order superscaler core that uses it would be harder than x86.
Biggest difference perhaps where 68000 is more complicated is postincrement but considering all the cruft 32bit X86 already inherited from 8086 compared to the "clean" 32bit variations of 68000 I'd make it a toss at best but leaning to 68000 being easier (stuff like IP relative addressing also exists on the RISC-y ARM arch).
Apart from addressing the sheer number of weird x86 instructions and prefixes has always been the bane of lowpower x86.