No: The BASIC on the QL was one of the best BASICs ever. What killed the QL was imho those fucking awful microdrive cartridges. Unreliable, slow and quick to fail.
The only real hardware bit that we could rib him about was the serial port design, but I can't even remember what was wrong with it now (handshaking?)
I do wish I'd snaffled the QDOS listing that got thrown away during an office move.
I remember at university writing a couple of little programmes that allowed the swanky BBC Model B (with no floppy drive) to use the Spectrum as a file server, over the serial interface.
But you're right-- it was too late to save the QL by then.
Of course, that wasn't the only problem with the machine, not by a longshot. I did my very first commercial hardware hacking in high school building/selling plug-in 'spiderboards' to protect the oh-so-fragile ZX8301 chips, and got my first oscilloscope in college to chase down all the ground bounce that was still occasionally killing the NMOS ROMs...