That's the difficulty here, people are already arguing past each other because nobody seems to agree what the ISA is for. If you look at the early history of R

That's the difficulty here, people are already arguing past each other because nobody seems to agree what the ISA is for. If you look at the early history of RISC-V, it does indeed look like as something built for teaching. But I don't think that use case warrants all the hype around it. So how did all the hype form, and why is it that there are people seemingly hyping it as the next-gen dream-come-true super elegant open developed-with-hindsight ISA that will eventually displace crufty old x86 and proprietary ARM while offering better performance and better everything? Of course that just baits you into arguing about its potential performance. And don't worry if it doesn't have all the instructions you need for performance yet, we'll just slap it with another extension and it totally won't turn into a clusterfuck with a stench of legacy and numerous attempts at fixing it (coz' remember, hindsight)! And then if you question its potential, you'll get someone else arguing that no no, it's not a high performance ISA for general use in desktops / servers, it's just an extensible ISA that companies can customize for their special sauce microcontrollers or whatever. Of course it's all armchair speculation because there are no high performance real world implementations and there aren't enough experts you can trust.