I loved the Amiga but I loathed all the XT/AT segmented memory bitplaned VGA 16-bit stuff. That to me is the deep dark ages.

I get the sentiment, but I have to nitpick the details ;)

VGA isn't bitplaned. It's chunky -- to put a pixel on the screen in 320x200x8 VGA mode 13h you literally just write a single byte to the VGA memory. The Amiga, on the other hand, does use planar graphics.

(Maybe you're thinking of EGA, which is planar and a pain to program for)