The approach the ST took with the original "Shifter" chip of just doing video as memory mapped raw bitmap
barely squeaked out for games. Frame rates were pretty bad. 8mhz 68000 and that bus speed wasn't responsive enough to really kick it. That era still really needed dedicated blit HW support. (As the Amiga showed). But that approach only really mattered until clock speeds went up and memory became slower than CPU speed.
It's a shame the Blitter chip that came with the STe never shipped with the original ST (wasn't ready in time) and just never really got large market penetration after that. It was actually a decent design.
The STe feature-wise is quite competitive with the Amiga overall, while keeping the simplicity of the ST's architecture. There just wasn't enough of them shipped for software houses to bother making games that used it.
That, and I have a couple Atari Falcon 030s here, and they're really amazing. They really nailed it with that machine, before packing it in.
Better (and very good) video modes, amazing sound, onboard 56k DSP chip & S/PDIF audio, both IDE & SCSI drive support, 68030 processor, up to 14MB RAM.