Uncharacteristically terrible post by you, Jeff. Hell yes the community has raked AMD. I still remember how badly AMD was (rightly) blasted for their CPU refresh with the FX-9xxx series. The tech reviewers/blogsphere also called out the GPU refresh with their RX 500 series, but
@560ti nailed two of the three reasons for why they weren't crucified for it. The RX 580, in particular, offered a leap in price to performance when it was released, especially in terms of the well-aging FLOP power, and the card absolutely kills it at 1080p.
The third reason was expediency. The RX 400 series debuted in June, 2016. The RX 500 series was released in April, 2017:
10 months later. That's a perfectly acceptable window for a refresh. Meanwhile, the GTX 10 series launched in May 2016, and this NVIDIA RTX launch didn't drop until September 2018:
28 months later. Everyone is well justified in expecting more. It's not even clear if Ray-Tracing will ever evolve beyond being a proprietary gimmick.
You're acting like they weren't abused for Vega's underwhelming performance and overpriced MSRPs. They were, and the only reason more wasn't shoveled was because we were in the middle of the cryptosurge, so gamers were preoccupied with a larger problem that more acutely affected Vega because cryptominers found it more desirable, so ire was directed at them, instead.