I don't think you're disagreeing with me here. The "worse is better" principle often boils down to a few fundamentals: "A functioning program is always better than a non-functioning one" and "an understandable product or specification is always better than one that cannot be understood".

Intel also made, and probably still does make RISC chips. The i960 and i860 are just two examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i860 They never took off on any appreciable scale.

> You're not necessarily buying x86, but rather buying the best silicon that happens to speak x86.

Or more specifically, you're buying the best chip that runs your existing software and works with the toolset you're familiar with.

This is why Intel's Itanium project was doomed from the day they announced it. Nobody was going to re-write everything to work with their new instruction set.

It's notable that Apple managed to go from 68K to PPC to x86 to x64 almost seamlessly, but they did that at the expense of backwards compatibility. You can run many Windows apps from the 3.1 days in current versions of Windows without emulation, but you can't run Mac software from the 68K days without it. Two different approaches.

The Intel world is ruled, if not held hostage to backwards compatibility concerns. "Better" means "more traditional".