You must be really naive if you think that going from a reliable and performing soldered solution to a crappy TIM one for two generations in a row isn't on purpose.
Wait, we are talking about your worshiped Intel here. My bad.
Imouto, I don't know your background so I have no idea if you are aware of what goes into the engineering trade-offs that a company might make in the pursuit of developing a product that performs consistently.
Consistency is key when trying to lower your cost of production per part. Engineering is rarely tasked with the goal of producing the highest performing product "regardless of cost". Outside of the NASA program to get to the moon, and a few other aerospace programs, there are very few engineering projects in this world where engineers got to do what they wanted so long as performance was improved.
Intel's situation with the gap is very much on purpose, no question, but you seem a bit confused as to what the purpose is. The purpose is not for "milking", it is all about "tolerance" (as in the engineering kind, machinery being involved and all) and the cost invoked when increasing engineering tolerances for mating multiple parts.
The engine in your car would be silly expensive if engineered to the tolerances of the gap between the IHS and CPU. Intel is already designing their products with a spendy budget in mind.
Could it be better? Sure. But at what cost? And with what tradeoff?
We all know there are legitimate concerns regarding stress-strain curves and the performance of finfet devices, that isn't rocket science nor is it a national secret. So it is of no surprise that Intel has engineered in a sacrificial slip layer to accommodate the unavoidable mismatch in coefficients of thermal expansion.
What none of us know in the public domain is how much of a performance vs cost tradeoff did Intel take in the change? Was it pennies or was it dollars (or tens of dollars)?
Arguing about how much better Intel could have made the 22nm IHS situation, in the absence of a balanced discussion regarding cost-adders, is no different than arguing that their stock HSF is going to be silly if one tries to overclock to 5GHz...nothing about that thermal conduction has been optimized for 200W power dissipation - not the IHS, not the CPU TIM, not the stock HSF.
It is all optimized for 4GHz operations and with a bevy of engineering related thermal stress concerns in mind. None of us know enough about the specific decisions made at Intel to second-guess the validity of those decisions.
Project management triangle FTW