Comment by deaddodo

> The context is that MS had much more capable hardware to run 95 on than the 68020 based Macs.

MacOS 8's initial release was after PowerPC-based hardware was already released. The OS had a separate kernel for that hardware. MacOS 9 never ran on 68k hardware (with an MMU or not).

It was perfectly capable of having that functionality, yet didn't.

You're just retroactively applying rationale to a bad design and making bad faith arguments (or "explanations"). Even Apple knew it was bad, that's why they threw it out.