I'd say, unequivocally, Polaris is more of a die shrunk iteration of GCN than Pascal is of Maxwell. Perf/mm2, perf/w and hardware feature sets prove that. Anyways, weren't people saying Nvidia wouldn't have any mid range to counter AMD in the months leading up to Polaris? Weren't people saying AMD would beat Nvidia to the new nodes? Weren't people saying AMD would have a manufacturing advantage and a die shrunk Fiji would have Fiji like performance and be the size Polaris? All of which were proven false.
The sky is always going to be falling on Nvidia for the hardcore AMD optimists. GP106 is better than Polaris by most measurements and GP107 is coming, it will be out months ahead of Vega. AMD can't execute and once again we will have another generation with Nvidia dominating sales 75-25% and AMD not making enough money to fully fund R&D.