AREXX ports were fantastic, but the language is awful. But Amiga BASIC was no longer shipped wit the OS as of 2.x anyway, so unless you got a copy elsewhere there was no choice. But Amiga BASIC had falled out of favour long before that.

AmigaBASIC was horrible. It didn't really make use of the OS facilities that well, and it was slow and cumbersome. Almost identical to Microsoft's BASIC for the Mac from what I've seen, and that was universally hated compared to MacBasic