I imagine Wirth chose 32032 for its purported elegance, not its longevity or commercial practicality. As I recall they had all sorts of initial problems and then lost the war for that market segment against the 68k.
I have heard many people talk about the NS32k in positive overall terms, I've researched it a few times, it looks like a nice CISC architecture, but not different/better enough than the 68k at the time.
I do recall the team under Jack Tramiel at Atari looked into the NS32k for their new 16/32-bit system, and even built a prototype, and then tossed it in favour of 68k because of purported bugs in the NS32k.
The 32032 instruction set was wonderful to generate code for. There were a few early bugs (if a floating point instruction crossed a page boundary, and a page fault was triggered, hilarity would ensue), but those were ironed out well before the chip was abandoned.
I have heard many people talk about the NS32k in positive overall terms, I've researched it a few times, it looks like a nice CISC architecture, but not different/better enough than the 68k at the time.
I do recall the team under Jack Tramiel at Atari looked into the NS32k for their new 16/32-bit system, and even built a prototype, and then tossed it in favour of 68k because of purported bugs in the NS32k.