The Amiga 1200 is my favourite Amiga, but I also think it was the worst Amiga upon release. It's main problem was that the specification did not meet what was required to compete in the market it was launched into in late 1992. The A600 queered the pitch somewhat. I like the A600 as a machine, but it fuzzed where the low range Amiga lied. In theory, having gone for the A600, the A1200 should have been a firm mid range machine, and probably in a desktop box format. However, Commodore decided that the A4000 would occupy the upper mid and top of the range with the 030 and 040 options, and other variants. The result of the A600 was a range of marketing which did nothing but dilute the Amiga brand, as it essentially presented something which was old as something new. When the A1200 did arrive it was met by a public that had two "new" machines presented to them in the A500+ and the A600 which were actually not really that new at all.
Having been labelled the mid-range machine by default, the A1200 should have been significantly better specced to take advantage of what the core hardware offered. I would put it down to these issues:
1, The price to performance cost of using a 030 was obvious. It should have been a socketed CPU. It should have been possible to upgrade by dropping in a new chip and a crystal. Commdore would have never done this as they were more worried about selling overpriced big box machines rather than securing the market with those that did not require the zorro slot options.
2, Two megs of memory was probably not enough, and even if they had stuck with it, they should have made at least half a meg of it fast ram to allow the CPU to run at its full potential. 4 megs would have made more sense and offered a good standardized platform which would have been attractive to coders and the public alike. The fact there was no ram sockets on the machine compounded this limitation.
3, The hard disk should have been a standard requirement. And I would also say that with a hard disk as standard, kickstart on ROM should have been dropped and an easy upgrade path created by allowing kickstart to be kicked from hard disk.
4, The AGA chipset probably did not quite cut it for late 1992. There was no real innovation, it was just increasing numbers on some of the specs. The AAA spec sounded much more appealing. The Amiga also needed support for cheap VGA monitors in all screen modes out of the box.
5, Not upgrading the Paula was a critical and completely crazy flaw. Not having 16 bit capabilities out of he box was utter madness, but Paula was incredible out of date by this time. This one act lost the opportunity to grab the music market from Atari, and let the PC in.
6, There was no 'standard platform'. Although PCs were made up of various different brands of components, they had one standard platform in MPC1 and MPC2 that set the benchmark for what useful machine should have. This gave coders something reasonable to work with. Amiga coders had to work to the assumption that the bulk of their customers would have unexpanded A1200s, which greatly limited what they could do with the machine. So much potential went to waste because of this. Very few games took advantage of expansions because of this, and the nature of Amiga applications and games became limited as a result. When PCs and consoles moved towards 3d shooters and simulations, the Amiga had the potential to keep up, but the expanded Amiga market was too small to make it worth while. The Amiga 1200 became anchored by the lowest common denominator spec.
I have other reasons, which I may elaborate on latter, but this is why I think the Amiga 1200 was the poor Amiga released when it came out.