Very much agree - I was (not very effectively) trying to make the point that its not just about transistor counts and that what you do with those transistors -

Very much agree - I was (not very effectively) trying to make the point that its not just about transistor counts and that what you do with those transistors - the field advancing as you say - matters a lot too. Credit to Hennessey etc who developed the original RISC concept. I do think though that if you look back at the history Intel put huge resources into the iAPX432 which was hugely overambitious and they had to rely on the fallback of the 8086/88. There is probably a reasonable case that if they had hadn't split their resources we might have had something better than the 8086.