How critical would a load–store architecture be to making that late 70s/early 80s "pre-RISC" better than the CPUs Intel and Motorola were cranking out? E.g. im

How critical would a load–store architecture be to making that late 70s/early 80s "pre-RISC" better than the CPUs Intel and Motorola were cranking out? E.g. imagine a simpler 16 bit extension of the 8080 than the 8086 was, with basically just more registers and focusing on making instructions execute in fewer cycles but maintaining a register–memory architecture (potentially also removing or simplifying some instructions but I think the 8080 ISA was already pretty minimal)?