The few in position to force a direction
And that's problem #1. Thinking it's about force. People respond well to choice and when given choices, they will pick the better of the options. When forced, people will respond with resentment and opposition. "You have a choice, you can do A or you can do B" will get you a lot further than, "Do this. Do that."
Population of the US in 1992: 255,175,338. Total Amiga sales in the US from launch in the mid-80s until discontinuation: 700,000
Population of the UK in 1992: 57,509,239. Total Amiga sales in the UK from launch in the mid-80s until discontinuation: 1.5 Million
I can't even find concrete stats on the Atari.
So yeah, the Amiga wasn't popular. Neither were popular. And I understand that the Amiga was better known. I get the whole getting caught up in a cool but relatively unknown computer. I had an original NeXT cube for years and only sold it a few years ago because the demand for them got so high. Go find somebody off the street who was alive in the era of these computers what any of these are and even if they were computers and nobody will know. Go ask any of these people if they realize that their macs or their iPhones are descended from a NeXT. Nobody will know. Irony: the NeXT cube was designed to be easily upgradable and it was. The motherboards and add-on cards could just be put into a different slot. No cables. Now iPhones and Macs generally can't be upgraded.
An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know.