It is easy to dismiss what Cisco demonstrated like this, but if you listen to the talk, they argue that having more tools available gives you more room to optim

It is easy to dismiss what Cisco demonstrated like this, but if you listen to the talk, they argue that having more tools available gives you more room to optimize for quality per bit per cycle, in the same way that having more choices allows you to optimize better for just quality per bit (or any other objective, really). So it's not just a matter of turning things off, but of making good choices. It is also not just beating AVC. They claim that it is higher quality than their own HEVC work, which they invested in heavily before it become clear that the licensing situation was not going to just "work itself out". They once told us that even they were surprised how many of the HEVC tools you could wind up using for real time, if you used them judiciously (basically: all of them). I have worked with some of the team responsible for this project before, and we collaborated with them on some AV1 tools (most notably the CDEF loop filter, but also entropy coding and a few other things). They know their stuff, and really do seem to be leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else on the RTC side of things.