I hear you and completely understand your way of thinking. I do think AMD has lost some customers. If people were honest. Anybody who had an AMD system prior to Ryzen and after Core 2 Duo was released by intel. They would be laughed out of any forum and people would think whoever sold them a system with an AMD system rolled them. I think I paid $172 for my Ryzen 3600 through newegg via Ebay.
There were points where bulldozer was so cheap it had value on the market. You could get fx-8350 for $70 new, AM3+ boards for $50. I have a couple in my garage.
Remember their direct competition back in the day was the 2600k, which as games became more multi-threaded, the fx-8350 competed quite well.
Seriously, is your ego so big you laugh people with lesser systems off a forum? Shame. That's not how any respectable forum member should act.
I am not calling the B550 and X570 motherboards a scam. But the VRM and PCB layers (luxury motherboards) are overpriced and do not return any real performance gains over standard B350/X370 and B450/X470 motherboards. I realize they added PCI-4 to the current generation of motherboards. PCI-5 is here so that was an evolutionary thing that only shows up on benchmarks and not real world performance.
If you preface your words with "not a scam" you're calling it a scam.
Every system has its tiers. You buy a high end motherboard for the features, VRM heatsinks, high end audio, wireless, m2 4x slots, etc, not the ability to run a certain processor.
The big Ryzen selling point was the performance, low energy consumption and affordable/inexpensive motherboards. I am not saying backplates on motherboards are not a nice to have feature. But $200+ motherboards with enhanced VRM performance and more PCB layers is not worth the increase in price based on performance numbers.
The big selling point was competition. Ryzen 1 was, for the most part, behind much of intel's line back in the day and this says something about AMD's disposition to being on top. They are fine in 2nd place. They've spent most of their time there.
I have been playing the waiting game with GPU and CPU upgrades.
I pointed out in a previous post that AMD's entire line of Zen 3 CPU's are in stock at both newegg and Amazon. AMD continues to talk of supply issues but the marketplace has no shortage of AMD CPU's.
What is worse. When RDNA2 was released AMD had an executive taking bets on AMD's ability to meet the demand of AMD GPU's. People do not believe that scarcity is a manufactured phenomena. Nvidia said there was a supply issue and Nvidia has GPU's at a higher availability rate compared to AMD.
I think the 5800x3d would be 5% improvement gaming @ 1440p and 2-3% @ 4K gaming. The 15% is obviously 1080p where both AMD and Intel love to play the numbers game at 1080P. It looks good on paper.
This is one area AMD is by far more kind, people with AM4 have seen an upgrade path for many years with drop in replacements that make certain skews incredibly economic. With many licenses tied to the motherboard, there is an easy path to replacing and trading existing parts down to less enthusiastic users.
I have a 3900x and a 5800x, the fact that I can go to microcenter and bundle a high end processor with a lesser motherboard and gift that to a friend/family member with my 3900x, outweighs chasing a few percentage points for a 12k platform. I am one user that would/is planing to buy a 5950x vcache because of the above.