I always thought the advent of RISC was a side effect of the (very) low register count and how hard it is to actually make optimal use of them without manually

I always thought the advent of RISC was a side effect of the (very) low register count and how hard it is to actually make optimal use of them without manually writing Assembler. The flat memory model on i386 at least made it somewhat easier compared to the segment address mode coming with 8086.