The ARM chips were brilliant and definitely the most pleasant of the RISC chips to handwrite for, particularly with a nice assembler that handles the quirks of

The ARM chips were brilliant and definitely the most pleasant of the RISC chips to handwrite for, particularly with a nice assembler that handles the quirks of dealing with constants for you. While the 68k ISA was a dead-end, that's mostly because Motorola was all-in on PowerPC; AFAIK there's no fundamental reason they couldn't have pulled an Intel and thrown transistors at it until it could keep up despite the decode complexity.