Right, now I have time to reply.
What don't you like about it? Don't want DDR5? Grab a DDR4 board. Don't like PCIe 5.0? Grab a PCIe 4.0 or older SSD/graphics card.
Objectively it is better in every day, other than rumoured pricing (and we all know how rumours go - heck, other than a lot of what I'm told being under embargo which I respect, a lot of vendors and/or suppliers give out a bit of patently fake information (unique to each person or company) so when it becomes "news" they know exactly where the leak occurred.
If objectively it's better in every way, what is there that is subjectively bad?
You are completely missing the point here. It's not about what people are ALREADY RUNNING, it's about what people are BUYING. The GTX 1060 is still the top card on Steam, it doesn't mean people are rushing out in doves to buy them.
Offices, people trying to get a little more life out of an outdated machine, and those trying to do repairs on the cheap are about the only ones buying Gen3 SSDs these days. GT 1030s are being bought exclusively by those who don't need it to begin with, but don't have integrated graphics.
The "average" gamer these days is buying an RTX 3060 - partially due to the terrible value offered by anything older, and partially due to availability.
The "average" person is buying either an ADATA Swordfish, about the cheapest and slowest NVMe drive on the market, clearly as a first dabble into NVMe or to upgrade/repair on an extremely tight budget, or they're going Gen4. That's not to say nobody is buying any other Gen3 SSD, but they make up a TINY number.
Look through those 75% of sigs running Gen3 drives and ask them when they were purchased - I'll bet that the very vast majority were more than six months ago.
It doesn't take that to hit the limit. Run a graphics card along with ANY other AIC on an Intel platform and you're halving your available lanes per device. Scale it up (and not by much at all) and suddenly you're nowhere near the potential available. PCIe lanes have been a bottleneck for many users for a long time - I dare say since PCI was phased out altogether.
They don't need to be Gen4. A PCIe 3.0 (or even 2.0) AIC will still halve the lanes available. As NVMe begins replacing SATA (it's already happening, with boards having more and more M.2 slots and less usable SATA ports, with ports being disabled when using an NVMe drive or the board simply offering less SATA ports) and that 7GB/s SSD is suddenly maxing out at the speed of a slightly above entry level NVMe drive.
The Z690 boards arguably have even nicer aesthetics, so your subjective points are potentially out the window. The price you're paying to get the absolute most out of RAM exceeds the gains, so value is out the window. Running air/water cooling, you're got nothing to worry about with pretty much any board available. I've sent out a Gigabyte Z390 UD, an extremely entry level board, with the CPU running at 4.9 GHz without issues to date.
Neither was released during severe component shortages. Things such as passive component shortages and sound/network controller shortages started since the release of either. I don't think there is a single component that isn't up in price since the release of Z590. CPUs, RAM, storage, graphics cards, PSUs and even cases have all gone up.
4800 is the lowest JEDEC spec for DDR5. The lowest for DDR4 was 1600. That's 3x the speed when comparing entry level to entry level. Of all the vendor SKU sheets I have, nobody, and I mean nobody, doesn't have something faster than 4800. Be it 5200 CL38 or 6600 CL36 (or higher
), everyone has something faster and/or tighter.
If you don't like the price of DDR5, go DDR4. If you don't like the price of PCIe Gen5, go Gen4 (or Gen3). You will need a new motherboard, with anticipated prices that definitely higher but not terrible, and a new CPU - but you don't need to go like-for-like (eg you don't need a 12700K to get better performance than you already have). CPU prices are rumoured across the internet to be insanely high, but I can't remember a generation launch that didn't have such rumours, with MSRP being much more reasonable.
I'm TRULY not sure why you're against Alder Lake, when it is proving to be better in every way and with more technological leaps than we've ever seen before - it's a first ever for PCIe Gen5, it's a first ever for DDR5, it's a first ever for BIG.little cores, it's a first for Intel in a long time that we have a meaningful IPC increase. Ryzen 5000 was exciting, but the last time I've been THIS excited about a CPU launch was probably Sandy Bridge a DECADE (yes, slightly more than 10 years) ago.
The expected evolutionary jumps (DDR5, PCIe5) are expected, but BIG.little has the possibility to revolutionise computing as we know it. We can have mega low power draw when idle/browsing the net/typing a document/watching a video, with an absolute powerhouse available within milliseconds when we need it.