My view of the history is that Steve wanted to take the Mac simultaneously in two directions: Get the “classic” Mac cheaper and more capable for home users, and build out a “Big Mac” line of workstation/business machines.
Both of these eventually happened despite him getting fired, but the Mac II series was only a workstation in the hardware sense.
IIRC, Steve had negotiated the UNIX license for Apple before he left. Given where NeXT went, I wonder if a Steve-driven “Mac II” would have included the OS rearchitecture that was otherwise delayed a decade by his absence.
I mean A/UX was effectively that, and it's Apple's fault for not properly maturing it into a general purpose product for all Apple customers?
I understand part of the reason was the license cost was so high?
You put your finger on Apple’s big problem in the inter-Steve era: Product.
They had all the pieces, or certainly the smart engineers and designers to build the pieces that were missing, but nobody with a strategic product vision to make the pieces fit.
The most serious indictment of their product thinking or lack thereof: They planned originally to do a total software compatibility break with PowerPC. Power Macs were a success rather than a disaster because a few engineers ran a skunkworks emulation & hardware design effort to build the bridge from 68k.