At that time, 486 was probably the minimum target they would expect it to run on. Pentiums had also started to become more affordable by 1997.
This was around 1995. I didn’t suffer too long with Composer on my 386, I got sick of the swapping pretty quickly and stuck with Notepad for a long time afterwards.
I didn’t upgrade my 386 PC until 1998 (couldn’t afford to), when I got a Cyrus 6x86, which is another story altogether. If you know about Quake and FPU performance with the 6x86, then you already know the story.