Mmmmm, yeah, you just reminded me of ConflictCatcher and extensions which would duel with each other....
There were (and still are) a legion of flaws with both systems.
But my big point was this:
If you wanted to, for example, add a new piece of hardware, say an external tape drive, on one system you just dragged a few files off of a floppy and plugged in the new hardware, not 100% of the time but as a general rule. On the other system, you would have to mess with IRQ conflicts, edit a bunch of files, and mess with it for several hours, not 100% of the time but as a general rule.
The point I'm trying to make is definitely not "System A was better than System B" but simply that the difference in convenience had nothing to do with whether one system had more Megahertz, more RAM, etc. I.e., the simplicity/useability difference was not driven by the hardware technology inside, it was independent of it and orthogonal to it.
Today's much more powerful hardware can hide a multitude of sins of the software. But I wanted to point out that continually upgrading hardware shouldn't have to be a requirement for things to keep getting better.
As a techie, complexity can be fun.
But sometimes, simpler is better.