I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and what I gathered from listening to the grey beards talk was that RISC based designs were more elegant, easier to understand, an

I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and what I gathered from listening to the grey beards talk was that RISC based designs were more elegant, easier to understand, and more efficient. When I first started hearing about then modern CISC cpus decoding to RISC, it was pushed as a justification that RISC was fundamentally superior. This was around the time IBM was pushing Power and everyone thought it was poised to dominate the industry.