The 7800's technical advantages are subtle in that relative to the rest of its generation, it can do lots of sprites smoothly and with varied color, but the out

The 7800's technical advantages are subtle in that relative to the rest of its generation, it can do lots of sprites smoothly and with varied color, but the output quality is relatively low res. It doesn't screenshot as well in a tiny magazine thumbnail, which is going to bias expectations towards "worse graphics". I do think that had it not had a terrible launch, used better controllers, and invested more in software dev and on-cart tech(there were scrapped plans for better audio chips) it could have gotten a serious market share. But the whole story of Atari is that it succeeded marvelously as a startup and then subsequently floundered as a large enterprise, and this is just one more example.