The separate architecture put it over the edge for me, personally. I’m barely competent at C (especially back then) and may have been able to just manage had it been on native arch.
It did force me to get decent with bitshifts, which is always a useful skill. I found this [0] article about doing so with the 68000, and adapted it.
The "in this arbitrary programming language we've never used before" was a common occurrence. At some point, we were given a PDF manual of some MIPS clone as well as a simulator.
In University, you were supposed to just pick these skills up all by yourself.
