> certainly looked like a reference about McEwen and Haynie's
> unsupported statements

There were no such statements by McEwen, at least not in public.

> how am I misreading that?

By ignoring the "3rd link" part of my answer. That 3rd link is about something that happened in 1997, so before MorphOS development even started

> Coldfire? It's only real advantage is an extremely low price.

I don't consider 40 to 50 USD (depending on order quantity) for a 266 MHz V4e (as used on the FireBee) "an extremely low price" when only 15 USD more can get you an e5500 with 4 times the clock rate and the same requirement for recompilation and emulation.

> if was going to pick something that I might code on with anything other than
> C or Python...I'd pick the CPU that was more similar to the 68K ISA.

There are hundreds more high-level languages than just C and Python, for none of which the programmer has to care about the CPU's ISA. It's really just ASM where the ISA counts from programmer's view.

> the Atari community didn't have a problem adopting a change that required
> recompilation or 68K JIT.

Neither had those members of the Amiga community who adopted OS4 or MorphOS. I really don't get the alleged advantage of ColdFire over PPC in this regard. And as with the number of PPC adopters among the Amiga community, the Atari community is orders of magnitude larger than the small number of its members who purchased a FireBee.

> OS3.1 source code floating around before broad dissemination in 2016?
> Seems likely.

When Petro Tyschtschenko was in charge during the 2nd half of the 1990s, he was reported handing out the 3.1 source code left, right and center, or so they say ;-)

> that 68080 designation just bugs me. You mean the 68K based FPGA design?

Yes, I mean the Apollo core when I write "68080". This was part of a yet unanswered question as to the meaning of an ambiguous wording you used ("our best hardware").

> Signetics already screwed up the 68070 designation, so now the hobbyists
> are going to simply assume the next logically number in that sequence?

Even worse, the 68080 forebears were called the N68050 and N68070 during NatAmi times :-)