A smaller node is useless if they don't decide to go the full way which is approaching towards the reticle limit. I would say your constraints are pretty similar in expecting a GTX 1060 to come out on top of a GTX 980 Ti ... 

I don't think you think you know what exactly AMD's goals are in mind. They only have political will to remain in the gaming market, not to dominate it like how Nvidia rolls out large specialized gaming GPUs. Technological superiority plays a role but at the end of the day what separates AMD and Nvidia is pure political will in which one will always use the bigger die. Just as gladiators live and die by their sword so too do the chips within their silicon but more specifically the size of it in many cases ... 

With Radeon VII, their main objective wasn't the gaming market but it was high end compute in deep learning. The Radeon VII is the exact same chip design found in their MI50/60 line of compute cards so AMD is obviously in it to make a quick buck for it in the gaming market despite a couple of flaws like half rate FP64 which only makes power consumption worse, disabled PCIE 4.0 which is still built into the chip, and then we have deep learning specific instructions which are somewhat similar to what Nvidia calls their "Tensor Cores" except baked into the instruction set as special instructions instead of a separate unit like Nvidia's implementation ... 

With AMD there are a several flaws with their approach when it comes to gaming like either not using a big die size or catering to the wrong market so without hitting these two notes properly they practically never are able to take the performance crown ... 

The fact that their policy is to make an underwhelming product doesn't really change that it's underwhelming.

That analogy doesn't work, since the Ti series is a pretty serious one and many many people buy them. If you were talking Titans vs an AMD equivalent, then yeah, I'd probably agree, even as a Titan buyer.

Yeah, I just checked the December 2018 Steam Hardware survey, and the 780, 980, 980m, 980ti, 1080, 1080 ti, and 2080 add up to just 6.21% of GPU's used by gamers on Steam. Titan V, Titan RTX, Titan X, Titan XP,  2080ti, and Vega 64 percentages are too low to even show up on Steam, so we're talking less than 0.15% on each of those models. It's clear to me why AMD just doesn't care about competing at the high end anymore when the total high-end marketshare across multiple generations of models from AMD and Nvidia is less than 10%.

That being said, AMD does need to try harder on mid-high end, the combined marketshare for Nvidia's "70" tier models, 1070 ti, 1070, 970, 770, 970m, and 2070 is 9.42%, while AMD's current marketshare in that mid-high end tier is less than 1%, and their most recent mid-high end chipset, the Vega 56, is at less than 0.15%, too low to even show up on the Steam Hardware survey.

Which sites?

Not only because it's cheaper. I guess both Sony and Microsoft doesn't really want to work with Nvidia at this point. Nvidia screwed both companies in the past. They screwed Microsoft with GPU prices for original Xbox which led to a lawsuit. And they made the worse GPU for PS3 than what was inside Xbox360 which came out a year before. I guess it costed more for Sony than X360 GPU as well.

Looks like u have not read the Forbes leak about Navi GPU/Sony, there is stated that Vega development team was just decimated by Lisa Su for Navi, because she bets more on partners ( good idea!!! ) than their own products. And we have it offical, VII is Vega on lower die shrink, thats all. But it is only one battle, the war is already in AMD's pocket.

The fact that MS has just confirmed the next Xbox will use AMD, simply put, is that they ( MS ) prefer inferior AMD's solution than NV. This is ... a knock down, or something.

All the trails leads to Navi/Vega in next gens what is good enough. i dont believe it was just a coincidence that Phil announecs collab on next Xbox at the VII presentation. Basically, it is Vega on 7nm, what is what next gens will have to, and  Vega was never planned to hit 7nm, Navi was, so...

Navi, is rumored to be developed with close collab with Sony. AMD has rich story with semi-custom things.

AMD does try a bit harder on the low-mid range though, Polaris for instance. When Polaris released, it's top of the line chipset, RX 480, roughly traded blows with Nvidia's 1060 in performance, beating the 1060 in games that were optimized for AMD cards and losing to it in games that were optimized for Nvidia GPU's (RX 480 also won on Vulkan games like Doom). And the best thing was the Rx 480 could usually be found for lower prices than the 1060, sometimes as much as $50 lower.

If you were talking Titans vs an AMD equivalent, then yeah, I'd probably agree, even as a Titan buyer.

Yeah, I just checked the December 2018 Steam Hardware survey, and the 780, 980, 980m, 980ti, 1080, 1080 ti, and 2080 add up to just 6.21% of GPU's used by gamers on Steam. Titan V, Titan RTX, Titan X, Titan XP,  2080ti, and Vega 64 percentages are too low to even show up on Steam, so we're talking less than 0.15% on each of those models. It's clear to me why AMD just doesn't care about competing at the high end anymore when the total high-end marketshare across multiple generations of models from AMD and Nvidia is less than 10%.

That being said, AMD does need to try harder on mid-high end, the combined marketshare for Nvidia's "70" tier models, 1070 ti, 1070, 970, 770, 970m, and 2070 is 9.42%, while AMD's current marketshare in that mid-high end tier is less than 1%, and their most recent mid-high end chipset, the Vega 56, is at less than 0.15%, too low to even show up on the Steam Hardware survey.

As for PS3, the reason why the GPU was weaker is mostly due to the fact that until the later stages of HDW development Sony planned to use the Cell to render games instead of a regular GPU. The RSX was inferior simply because it was engeneered on a short notice.