So slightly improved is bad?
Yes, compared to a normal generation where the price/performance gets a decent bump each generation it is bad. Compared to the 3080's improvement over the 2080 for the price that it was supposed the be, the 4080 and 4070 Ti are really bad. Do you realize that we can just calculate the price/perf improvement per gen and compare?
I know everyone dreams of massive improvements for the same money, but is that realistic?
Yes, it should be very realistic, because reasonable calculations of the cost changes for the new cards do not suggest that such a huge price increase is warranted for the 4080 and the 4070 Ti.
Nvidia's price changes are also completely inconsistent with the cost price going up by a huge amount, because any such increase would impact the 4090 the most, since it is the only tier where the chip didn't shrink significantly. Yet that is the card with the smallest increase in MSRP. So then you have to believe that Nvidia would accept a huge loss in margin for their top tier. I have a bridge to sell you if you believe that.
Also, we know that the 4070 Ti's price was initially inflated, because they lowered the price by $100 when they relaunched it as this tier instead of as an identical 4080 12GB. So again, I have a bridge to sell you if you think that they couldn't just decrease the price of the 4080 by $100 without blinking an eye.
If it is, why didn't AMD provide it and take massive market share. Doubly so, since AMD's MCM chips give it a production cost advantage...
It doesn't provide AMD with a massive advantage, because N31 underperforms significantly. N31's GCD is about on par with the monolithic AD103 that is slightly bigger, but doesn't have the cost of 6 MCD's and the interconnects and has a smaller bus. No way this is what they planned for.
Also, Lisa Su consistently chooses to make long-term commitments for relatively few wafers and aim for relatively high prices, rather than volume. This is also why they lost market share during the mining boom, as each company then clearly sold all they had, so we know that AMD hadn't even bought enough wafers to keep their low market share, let alone fight for growth.
There are strong indications that lots of TSMC orders are getting reduced in size and you can bet your boots that once contracts come up for renewal or when a contract for a product ends, new contracts will be smaller in size. Since fixed costs of chip production are very high, it is likely that TSMC will have to reduce their prices again, to increase demand for wafers, (partially) undoing their price increases during the boom. That makes it more attractive to sell volume rather than go for larger margins.
The optimistic narrative is then that AMD fixes their chip & Lisa Su grows some balls and starts to order more wafers & cuts the prices. It's plausible that TSMC will be open to more flexible contracts, so AMD doesn't get stuck with lots of unsold product if their attempt to gain market share fails. Also, regardless of if they do so, Nvidia seems to have priced the 4080 and 4070 Ti at a level where many people simply won't upgrade at all, even if AMD is not an alternative, so best case scenario is that they need to lower to previous gen prices to sell. A more pessimistic scenario still sees significant price cuts to get customers buying at moderate volume. To keep the prices at this level, you need an extremely pessimistic scenario, like a new GPU mining boom or Jensen actually being insane (which is probably the more realistic option of the two).
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