Exactly. And let's not then get into the joy that is bankswitching, 16kb ROM Banks and tiny RAM limits ;)
But yeah, Argonaut software did make what was effectively a proto-type version of what eventually became Starwing / StarFox on the SNES. With sampled speech and everything! It's amazing what could actually be done on a machine with a lil 4MHz modified Z80 processor!
I'm using a flat 32KB ROM for my entry (almost using half of it here), and the RAM limit is completely fine - ideally I'd have a 64x64 map which would chew up exactly half of the memory, and then the other half would, as usual, be hardly touched at all.
But if I need more ROM space, I can always just shove tilesets and music into the second slot. I'd have to manually pick the bank numbers (this is because you can't put bank 0 into the swappable slot) but WLA-DX can automatically find a spot to put them in each bank.
I'd say these days, bank switching really isn't an issue, as I highly doubt that your *code* exceeds 16KB.
That's cool. Yeah MBC1 style switching is much easier to deal with than MBC5 :) Most of my needs for bankswitching come from asset loading but I have had to resort to placing screen manager code in other banks for safety as I'm down to ~3k left in bank 0 with a few more fetures to add and possibly extern into other banks. It's fun experimenting with how to use bankswitching in general though.
Best of luck with your entry fanzy flani, looking forward to playing through it!