It seems to be more about skill and budget of the development teams, and those are both getting bigger. I think a major underlying factor is the massive increas

It seems to be more about skill and budget of the development teams, and those are both getting bigger. I think a major underlying factor is the massive increase of transistor budgets relative to clock speed and latency to memory. That pulls every architecture down the path of big caches, speculation, specialized functional units, multiprocessors, etc, that add complexity dwarfing anything in the front end. If I was starting fresh the labor to do x86 would be a handicap but on the other hand Intel switching to RISC-V or whatever wouldn't do anything for them.