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.