I don't think it was a case of the 68k being bad, anymore than the 6809 was bad. I think they had a desire to jump on the RISC bandwagon with the 88000. They didn't seem to be too concerned about backwards compatibility when they did their jumps. The 88000 had low adoption (the price was a bit high) with Data General being the main company buying it (and, if I remember correctly, the bus living on in the early PowerPC).
I wouldn't say they abandoned the architecture, it just wasn't a PC chip. They did try a modernized version with Coldfire, but the original 68K line found a home in PDAs and embedded. DragonBall was pretty successful. The 68K ended up in the non-PC market because most of their customers jumped to RISC and they didn't execute the jump successfully enough to attract customers. Sun had SPARC and HP had PA/RISC.
I wouldn't say they abandoned the architecture, it just wasn't a PC chip. They did try a modernized version with Coldfire, but the original 68K line found a home in PDAs and embedded. DragonBall was pretty successful. The 68K ended up in the non-PC market because most of their customers jumped to RISC and they didn't execute the jump successfully enough to attract customers. Sun had SPARC and HP had PA/RISC.