Why is the release date of Zen 3D such a contentious issue? I don't see the point of so many posts debating that. I do have to question AMD's motive for announcing it months before it intends to release it. Is it worried that it may lose the performance crown to Intel with the launch of Alder Lake?
The reason they announced it so early is that credible leaks had started to come out, and they wanted to be in front of them. Because the product involves advanced packaging which involves so many other companies, they could not have kept it under wraps.
As to the ceaseless cache amount debate:
The height of the cache stack gives AMD a tool they can use to trade cost for performance. If Alder Lake releases and would beat a Zen3 with a single layer of cache, but not more layers, AMD absolutely will release a version with however many layers it takes to take that crown. However, if Zen3 with a single layer beats the highest-clocked Alder Lakes, I can see AMD preferring to save on cost and just ship one-layer versions.
The positioning of TR is irrelevant, because the selling point of low-core-count TR systems is IO, not performance.
Other than that, trying to divine more meaning to statements from AMD is pointless. They have no reason to give detail this early, so just because they are not directly talking about something yet, doesn't mean they are not doing it.