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.
Yep, the retelling I heard from the David Karlin (I worked with him after Sinclair went bust) was the micro drives didn't meet the spec that he designed the gate array to.
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.
Someone did eventually bring out a floppy-drive peripheral for the QL, but it was basically too late to save the platform. Also, iirc, you needed to be drop-dead rich to afford one.
Many people did, and the drives were not expensive at all really, not if you ever popped over to a swapfest (I had one, and money was very tight in our family at the time, but Dad was adamant that we have a computer to play with--- forward thinking, plus he wanted to play with it too).
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...
There were long delays in delivery if you ordered a Sinclair QL, to the point that people speculated that 'QL' stood for a long 'Q' and an 'L' of a wait!
