The author seems to be unsure as to how widely the 2500UX was sold; I can confirm first hand that it was a real thing; I obtained parts of one from a dumpster dive at a Canadian university in the early 2000s. Sadly the case was mangled by a friend who really wanted its floppy drive for an SGI Indy we'd found in an earlier haul...
(I still have the 2500's accelerator card. The Indy is intact, boots, and sitting dormant in a cozy heated garage on a farm somewhere. There's also this hilarious story about how I tracked down the machine's original owner and naïvely asked him for help with removing the root password. He was amused and actually did so, though not without throwing a fair amount of shade at the university for poor hardware disposal practices...)
I remember getting one on loan from Commodore Netherlands around 1992-1993. We were an ISV back then, and CBM provided these machines to allow us to talk to their engineers back in Pennsylvania via email and Usenet. While the emails are not preserved, I did find a post I highly likely made using an A3000UX [1]. We had the machine dial in once per day to sync email and Usenet posts. Phone costs were high, so we had to keep the phone line open as short as possible. It was actually quite handy because picking up the phone in the Netherlands to talk to an engineer in the States was prohibitively expensive (around $9 per minute in todays money, iirc). It was my first use of The Internet.
I've always associated Amigas with AmigaOS, and this is the first I heard about Unix. Why would you replace AmigaOS with Unix? Is it because it would be substantially cheaper than other 68030 Unix workstations?
That the suggested deals don't make a lot of sense doesn't mean there weren't discussions. Maybe the discussions ended because the deals wouldn't have made sense.
Maybe discussions happened during development when it wasn't so obvious that they didn't make sense.
(I still have the 2500's accelerator card. The Indy is intact, boots, and sitting dormant in a cozy heated garage on a farm somewhere. There's also this hilarious story about how I tracked down the machine's original owner and naïvely asked him for help with removing the root password. He was amused and actually did so, though not without throwing a fair amount of shade at the university for poor hardware disposal practices...)
[1] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.multimedia/c/Vyt0...
Maybe discussions happened during development when it wasn't so obvious that they didn't make sense.