Indeed. As a student (1987) I had an Amiga 500 and after a few months I sold it and bought an Atari Mega ST2 in its place. The Amiga was so unpleasant to use for programming. To be confortably usable it required at least 2 floppy drives (a 3rd one would even been useful) or a hard drive, expanding beyond 1 MB was also not cheap and the display was horrible. TV resolution 576i (PAL) is inadequate for editing text.
On the Atari we had the cheap SM-124 fantastic monochrome 71Hz refresh rate screen which allowed to stay for hours programming. All compilers and editor I needed would fit in one 800K floppy and the 2 mb of RAM would even allow to work from RAM disk. A breeze. Gaming was still possible with the second cable connected to the TV set (later I installed the PC-Speed emulator in my Mega ST which transformed it in a very capable XT PC (8Mhz V30, 704 kB DOS memory, with 640x400 Olivetti graphics).
The Amiga was better for gaming, no contest, for serious stuff like porgramming, word processing (pixel perfect Signum!) and stuff, it was so much better in lower budget.