It’s clearly a clockspeed vs CU scenario that basically nobody expected, not even hardcore PS fans since the talk was quickly moved over to the SSD advantage instead after the GPU specs were official.
And all this essentially happened because everyone compared PC GPUs with similar differences to show how more CUs always win over higher clock speed.
But consoles aren’t PCs.
And nope I’ve never believed that there is a tools problem, if anything it’s probably just a result from how difficult it is to take advantage of more CUs. Stadia has a ton of CUs as well, 46 I think, older gfx architecture though but even so, barely any advantage over X and Pro. CUs might be important in the future but who knows we might have PS5 Pro with 72 CUs by then.
In the end we still know the XSX will be an awesome place to play because of all the new studios, but as you say MS has used the power as the big thing and when that isn’t seen it all fall kinda flat.
Personally I would’ve gone all in advertising Retroarch on Series X|S and make sure it was easy to find and install in retail mode
But that’s just me