I'd say your post is the bizarre one.  You speak of the beginning of this gen as if it has any bearing on MS's position, now.  As if nothing has changed since then.  As if MS doesn't have a new CEO.  As if Gates himself didn't say he was fine with spinning off Xbox from MS.  At the beginning of this gen MS was hot off the highly successful 360.  Of course, they were going to try and win the coming gen, including selling at a decent loss, when they thought they had a shot to win.  Unfortunately for them, they banked on cable and Kinect being a big enough draw to mask their weaker HW, as well as their vision of always online gaming.

Yes, the XBO S has been cheaper for the past couple of years, but I highly doubt they, or Sony when they sold the PS4 for $199 during BF, are losing any money off of HW.  At worst, they are breaking even at those prices.  Sure, MS may not be making much of a profit off of HW, but that doesn't mean they are losing any, either.

There is no way the X is being sold at a loss.  I highly doubt they are selling at break even, either.  And this is exactly my point.  The X could have been the Xbox's big comeback, in terms of HW.  They could have pulled off what Sony did with the PS3 Slim, which changed their fortunes.  Sell at a loss so that you are within range of your competition and continue to spend money on pumping out many high quality games.  Instead, MS sold the X at break even, at worst, at launch and their 1st party content slowly dried up. 

Which brings us to today.  It seems pretty obvious that MS is starting to focus, yet again, on their always online vision of gaming.  Only this time they are implementing it through streaming and digital goods, not so much draconian DRM.  This is the new MS, with a new vision for Xbox.  The one that oversaw the release of the X. The one heavily pushing the xCloud and Gaming Pass, even stating that is the exact reason they bought the new studios, more content for those services, not more exclusives for Xbox HW. I highly doubt they are going to be heavily subsidizing any HW moving forward.

It isn't how you start it's how you finish. Something other than a little bird tells me Microsoft will not stop until they own the title of most powerful console in the galaxy.

This has to be the lowest grade rumor you can get. It does the appeal to authority, sourcing it to Sony partner game devs, but then drops the ball with pathetic detail-less "more powerful" claim. WTF does that mean exactly? Why would a technically skilled game developer sharing insider info NOT state exactly what type of superior performance they mean? (CPU, GPU, RAM size/speed) Why would anybody take this as a real insider leak, rather than astroturfed clickbait to escalate the faithful's anticipation while not putting out new info beyond Sony's existing PR schedule? BS.

I voted for PS5. But it will be irrelevant. These days gfx are pretty good in most games. Exclusives is what matters IMO and that is where PS5 will win. In fact if Microsoft can undercut PS5 price by 100$ I think they will be really competitive or they should release the console at least few months early.

At this moment in time I don't think anyone cares when we have no idea what either console is delivering in terms of games performance and visual quality. We need more concrete numbers and a proper look at games before X more is more powerful than Y starts to be interesting and likely they'll just be very similar. I more interesting in whether they will place focus on different things, like one maybe has better Ray traycing solutions but less pixel pushing power.

Guys they will basically have the exact same spec, the options for Sony/microsoft is limited.

I expect both to have zen2 8 core, 16 thread cpu clocked at 2,6ghz, a cut-down navi 10, 36CU clocked at 1,6ghz (7,4 Teraflops), 1TB SSD and 256-bit bus with 12GB+ Vram and 448 GB/s memory bandwidth, both consoles will have hardware ray-tracing and they will be priced at $500.

Xbox lockhart will be identical but with half the gpu power so 18CU clocked at 1,6ghz and be discless.

Even though the Teraflops is low the gaming performance should be good, we looking at geforce 2060 performance. Geforce 2060 is just very slightly below vega 64 performance a 12,5TF gpu.

Flops is irrelevant.

The big thing happening next gen is Ray Tracing.
Microsoft has outright stated that Scarlett will have hardware accelerated Ray Tracing.
Sony has stated it's Playstation 5 console can do Ray Tracing but no mention on whether it is hardware accelerated.

PC variant of Navi doesn't have hardware accelerated Ray Tracing, but can still do it via brute force essentially... But then again, so could the base Xbox One.

If The Xbox 5 has hardware accelerated Ray Tracing and the Playstation 5 does not, then that is a significant advantage in the Xbox's favor... Irrespective of the similar base hardware architecture. (Zen+Navi+GDDR6+SSD)

Depends on the devkit variant.
Some early Xbox 360 dev kits used a Mac, which were close enough but not a match for the Xbox 360 environment.

No.
Microsoft will leverage Direct X+Low Level API.
Sony will leverage Vulkan+Low Level API.

Neither Sony nor Microsoft have an advantage in this area, neither will be "closer to the metal" than each other.

That is only your opinion and may not be fact.

Scarlet will be no more limited by the Xbox One and PC than the Playstation 5 will be limited by the Playstation 4 and PC.

Contrary to popular belief... The games library of the Playstation and Xbox tend to be identical for the most part, exclusives are a very tiny fraction of the overall games library.

Honestly at this point it doesnt matter...... graphics are already so darn good.
Game library is the only thing that matters now.

^ this.

If PS5 comes out and is 8 Tflops, and the xbox is 9.... it wouldnt even matter.
At 4k those differnces will be minor.

Resolution stuff is much more noticeable at lower resolutions.

I do wonder if this will become a hot topic again. After seeing the same thing mentioned for at least 2 generations (read: the past 13 years), I think it is safe to say that power does not hold any sway when it comes to selling consoles. Yes, some might buy into the 'sharper images' thing but in all, if you really need to compare the size of your whatever, you go PC baby :).

I am certain they will end up comparable with a slight advantage for Microsoft, as is always the case. As long as neither of them fucks up before the release, Sony will sell most.