A pity they had no magic 8 ball, or you with a Delorean to go back and tell them innit then?So stopping ambitious server ARM K12 project in 2015 (year when A77 and server Neoverse N1 development started) is very bad move.
Hindsight is 20/20 - but again pish poshing R&D budgets is ridiculous, they have to justify expenditures to investors, and back then ARM was simply not a priority, and certainly not in comparison to x86.
You can get loans yes, but justifying a whole extra ISA uArch team back then would not have gone well considering that ARM server prospects were simply nowhere near their current place.
The fact that they significantly scaled back their properties during that period demonstrates that there is no magic money tree when in debt and on the ropes as they were.
As I have mentioned earlier, the mess with Vega release shows that back then they lacked the staff, and perhaps even the correct management structure to handle 2 concurrent projects of that size and expect a sanguine result from both at the finish line
Either way your argument is becoming increasingly pointless as the Cortex X program effectively makes such problems moot.
Even without customisation it will be able to compete with others in the market (most of which are already using N1) - with customisation, no doubt there will be SMT variants, and lord knows what else for X2 and beyond.